


Puppeteer

by Bryn Lantry (Bryn)



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1992-01-01
Updated: 1992-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-03 21:08:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 40,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/385978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bryn/pseuds/Bryn%20Lantry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Avon's a weirdo. He sets out to psychostrategise Blake and falls in love with him. Poor Avon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Puppeteer

**Author's Note:**

> An earlier version printed as 'E-Man-Uelle 8', 1987; this version printed in 'Homosapien Too', editor Julie 'Stew' Bozza, 1992, and again as a single-story zine from Judith Proctor
> 
> Original dedication: To Stew, sister and trusty fellow eccentric, without whom I would have burnt it nine years ago. She and me invented slash separately, as I imagine many people have done, then confessed to each other. Shortly we were overjoyed to discover it wasn't a weird invention of ours, and other people wrote this kind of thing. - Bryn XXX
> 
> What can I say? I spent my late teenage years on this story, obsessively, over and over. To me now, the last third or quarter has - a fair bit of what I thought it had. Anyhow, it's history, my history.

###  
##  
#

You chose a lion to be your lover.  
Me, who in joy such doom greeting,  
Dared jealously undertake  
Cruel ordeals long foreseen and known,  
Springing a trap baited with flesh -- my own...

Gratitude and affection I disdain  
As cheap in any market:  
Your naked feet upon my scarred shoulders,  
Your eyes naked with love,  
Are all the gifts my beasthood can approve.

Robert Graves

#  
#  
#

Vila nudged Avon. “What do you say to a limerick contest?”

Avon said no more to a limerick contest than to anything else since teleporting. Deep in his inappropriate fur-lined jacket, he was looking down at nothing in particular. The play of light and dark happened to paint shadows where his eyes should be, giving his morbidity a theatrical air. However, he did liven a little, to watch Vila’s big toe tracing suggestive patterns in the sand.

“Strip poker, then?” asked the thief

“You may be desperate for excitement, but I doubt strip poker in this company would be much of a thrill.”

Vila sighed. “What I want to know is, what’s the point of all this surviving we do if we never do anything but survive? I mean,” he complained, “surviving may be a twenty-four hour a day job for the likes of us, but the effort is wasted if we don’t enjoy ourselves.”

“No-one’s playing strip poker,” Blake spoke up. “Not where I can see them.”

“Play it solo,” Cally added.

“Story of my love life.” Sprawled on his stomach, Vila pulled a glum face at his wistful artwork.

“And Vila, when we find these people, the Ulus -- behave yourself. They’re a religious sect as well as political dissidents, and Kisir Kadin is a primitive world with a morality to match.” Even when joining in a conversation these days, Blake had a miles-away frown. He was as moody as Avon, though instead of going torpid he snapped twigs into pieces one after another with restless hands. “That means, too, no boasting about that last fat wallet you plucked or your latest grand bank swindle.”

“Not to mention that last child you molest--”

“Don’t say that, Avon.” Blake’s eyes swivelled round, vehement and tense.

“Ah,” Avon smiled. “I forgot you’re no common criminal. The name rebel, I tend to think, is a misnomer. It’s the criminal who’s the individualist, the pioneer. You weren’t imprisoned for rebellion, in any meaningful sense, but for hackneyed idealism. Those false charges probably had more daring originality than your true sins. Not being a criminal, you know, hardly makes you a representative leader on the Liberator.”

“That depends on what part of you you want represented.”

Cally was dishing out the evening soup. Toying with his, Blake ignored the indecipherable stare Avon apparently thought he had earned. Once Blake had sunk back into abstraction, forgetting the tent and the desert beyond and his shipmates, Avon began again. “And not being a crim, Blake, you’re not even aware of the opportunity you’re wasting. There’s nothing quite like the license given to the condemned. We’re free in a way you never considered.”

“What distortion of liberty have you managed to see in a rope about your neck?” asked Cally, since Blake wasn’t going to.

“In the eyes of the state and its citizens, we’ve no virtue left to worry about losing — so we needn’t even try to be virtuous. We can’t fall any lower, no matter what heinous things we care to do. Since we’re under sentence of execution anyway, additional crimes won’t make any difference. They can’t do worse than kill us, so we’re exonerated from further punishment. For myself, I’d like my list of crimes to be as long and as gruesome as possible. Just for the triumph of turning our inevitable deaths into only a pathetic retribution.”

“Anarchic talk,” Cally dismissed this. “There’s no such thing as moral anarchy, not even in you. Everyone has their laws.”

“There’s no such thing as exoneration,” said Blake more quietly.

Avon pursued, “So it was fitting that Jenna named the ship Liberator, after all. Unlimited freedom for a limited time. Though Blake had a triter idea in mind.”

“You’ve been on the run too long,” Blake said. “The stress is telling on you.”

This annexed farming world of Kisir Kadin, Avon couldn’t help but suspect, had been chosen by Blake for its utter obscurity. Blake spoke ambitiously of questing for Star One -- and then buried himself here, to help a nomadic goat-herding sect of religious terrorists scare the Federation off their backwater. The only conclusion possible was that Blake needed time to think. Among yokel dissidents far enough away from the action to still welcome a no-longer-so-popular rebel hero. So Jenna was left with the ship to herself for two weeks.

First to finish eating was Vila, who promptly fished for more. Doing significant things with his eyes, he told Avon, “It’s time you tried a novel form of satisfaction. Instead of eating that last bit of pita, you deny it to yourself. Used to be thought quite a kick in the religious age.”

“I’m no monk. Try Blake.”

Glancing at this daunting prospect, he continued with Avon. “People don’t live by bread alone.” A nonchalant hand lay on his pack.

“With Blake they do.”

“What wouldn’t I do for just a bite more...”

“What wouldn’t you?” Avon sounded curious.

“Don’t get too novel. Which reminds me – I’ll tell you a limerick for it. Brand new one. Or at least you’ll have forgotten it since the last time I told you.” As Avon didn’t verbally object, he trotted it out. _“An anal erotic named Herman, had a passion for buggering mermen. He’d lure the poor swine from their haunts ‘neath the Rhine, with songs in execrable German_.”

Cally mulled this one over. “Must be Terran, I don’t understand some of the references.”

“I understand none of them,” claimed Avon. But he was being entertained out of his misanthropy.

“Thirsty climate, isn’t it?” Vila remarked, not quite irrelevantly. “Avon, you’re a man not of mere appetite, but of discerning taste...”

“Are we talking weight for weight here? So many grams of my pits for so many millilitres of...”

“I thought petty theft was beneath you. At least a two-hundred to ten ratio, when one takes into consideration the relative market value...”

By now the pita had been consumed, and negotiations broke down. “For the love of heaven, have mine if it will keep your mouth clamped,” Blake said, tossing it over. “Haggling over a crust of bread. I’m not hungry anyway.” Thrusting a hand through his knotty hair, he wandered out of the tent.

Cally and Avon, contemplated the space where he no longer was, and then each other. She cocked her head. “I think your idea of humour isn’t his.”

“My idea of nothing is his. After two years I begin to doubt it’s mere coincidence.”

“Can’t you let him be, just for this mission?”

“Blake scouring desperately for friends. A blatant wild goose chase. The odd thing is, I can’t remember why I went along with it.”

“When he asked your opinion, all you troubled to say was _I don’t care_. Blake’s going through a crisis.”

“Why are you telling me? Blake’s crises are always self-induced.”

“He bends over backwards for you of all people, because you kick up such a fuss. In reply you push him ever nearer paranoia.”

“Tell me, Cally. When last did he say anything noteworthy to you?”

“Hassling him for being too self-involved will only drive him further in. If he talks to no one, it’s probably your doing. You’ve cured him of all desire to try working together. So when he gives up completely and charges off alone for some suicidal finale...”

“If he can’t take the things I say it’s his failing. The day he’s tough enough to beat me, I’ll know he’s tough enough to run a chance beating the Federation. Then I might give him a little credence. You help him your way, Cally. Keep him happy and soft. My way might just keep him alive.”

“You could relent enough to mention it’s for his own good.”

“That’s rather counter-productive. Now is when he needs the attitude everybody’s out to get him. I always knew one day it would be true. Why should I display a change of heart just when he’s as tarnished in his allies’ eyes as in his enemies’? Blake’s going off the rails and the rebellion is disenchanted.” Avon stood, eyes following Blake outside. “I never was enchanted, so don’t look at me.” He left.

#

Twin white moons bled a cold, spectral light over the desert. “I like the tattoo. It doesn’t suit you at all, which explains why.”

Blake glanced up to see Avon, then down at the dulled rose on his left breast. Washing, he wasn’t pleased to have company. But he had to bite back a grin. “At the time I was never going to catch sight of daylight again. More to the point, daylight was never going to catch sight of me. So I decided what the hell.”

“You had it done in prison? Alphas don’t wear tattoos.”

“Everyone gets tattooed in prison, don’t they? There’s never much else to do inside.”

Avon observed each movement as Blake soaped vigorously. In company Blake clung with faint neurosis to his shirt, and now shot him a tight look. “Don’t you ever need to blink?”

The chest was without any hair, and heroically built. But it was a museum for scars -- he had a grand odd-and-end collection. Blake seemed to consider it indecent exposure to let them be seen. After a while Avon said, “Have you told anyone the history of those?”

“Most I don’t know myself. Gives me something to muse on. Wondering what was done to me that time.”

There was a weal about his lower ribs, like a frail milky drawing in the alien moonlight. Unabashed as ever, Avon gazed. “Funny, I still don’t have any.”

“I’m a natural for them. Avon, I assume you’re not gracing me with your company to trade tales of our war wounds.”

“Maybe I am. Your ship is going to be sinking pretty soon, Blake.” He used the same conversational tone. “Do you plan on going down with it?”

Towelling himself, Blake said nothing.

“Lately you’ve been voicing moral qualms.”

“Not to you.”

“Imprecise of me -- you voice nothing. Instead you’ve been prowling round and round the flight deck with a confused scowl replacing that gentlemanly charm and wit they used to like you for. We tacitly agree, don’t we, that the purpose of this mission is to fix you up with a hasty shot of self-confidence?”

“I wouldn’t try to psychoanalyze me, you’ll only regret it.”

“On the contrary, I always figured my survival chances improve if I can follow the quirks, cliches and contradictions that make up your brain. Parts of you still puzzle me. But give it a week in a cramped tent and I’ll have the remainder of you down pat.”

“I’m here,” said Blake tightly, “because I can’t find Docholli.”

“I rather thought you were here to postpone finding Docholli. Wisely enough, since he’s likely to be your death warrant. Once you know the location of Star One, your fanaticism will take you over completely. Maybe you’re not looking forward to that.”

“Look, I have noted your disapproval and accept that this mission is entirely my own. You needn’t get involved.”

“Which isn’t what I was after — it’s what you are after.”

“Then I fail to understand what you’re badgering me about.”

“I merely want an answer to my original question. Whether you’re suicidal enough to continue your war. If all I’m hanging around for is a tear-jerking farewell as you kamikaze into the sunset... well, then I have more fruitful things of my own to be getting on with. But, Blake, if you’re beginning to get doubts about whether it’s worth the ultimate sacrifice after all — why don’t you tell me?”

Squinting at him through the dimness, Blake misunderstood. “Everyone but me is allowed to doubt, is that it? Me, one piddling doubt and the image is ruined. What am I, some kind of proxy idealist for you? The day you of all people use me for vicarious heroism is the day I throw it out the window.”

“Vicarious heroism?”

“What else am I but a wish-fulfilment fantasy to the populace at large? By believing in me they can feel virtuous without doing any bleeding themselves. Let’s have no ambiguity – you’re perhaps the only one who never gave a hoot.”

“And what am I for you, some kind of proxy scoundrel? A bit of iconoclastic relief when you need it? Why don’t you simply say you prefer me not believing in you? You need someone who agrees with you on the days you don’t believe in yourself.”

Dressed again, Blake planted himself frankly near Avon, though with his arms wrapped round himself. “I want a truce. Only for these two weeks. While planetside we can’t run away from each other. I always believed that in a particularly bad patch I could ask for leeway. And that you would understand enough to lighten up, when I was serious. Listen, I”m staring chaos in the face. It’s gone further than I originally imagined. Hell, I’ve given half my mind, don’t think I’m reluctant to give my life in this fight -- I promised it years ago, I knew what I was saying. Only, because I stated that willingness in years past they don’t consider me anymore as still alive, damn it, and prey to common mortal fears just like any human, which after all is all a fated martyr is until the martyrdom actually happens. I’ve not been dramatically shot dead yet.” He stopped, as if he feared he were raving.

“I get the impression your rebel friends are pushing you with indecent haste into the mourned hero category. Alive, you’re becoming too fractious.”

“Oh, I dare say I’ll be a sight more influential dead. If the Federation recognized that, the rebels can’t have failed to figure it out. But the truce, Avon. I need a while of peace. To keep me calm and collected. So I’m asking, one outcast to another -- a little grace.”

Avon lifted his brows. “Well, don’t imagine anyone else is going to give you any.” Maybe he was no longer interested enough to make Blake do without his truce. Bored with Blake, so bored with fighting him.

That was that -- Blake considered it shaken on. “What’s your opinion, then?” He smiled at Avon. Not the easy smile the technician had left for others to be won by. This one was spiritless — but somehow he found the loss of charisma poignant. “Do I slog on trying to prove I knew what I was doing all along -- or do I abandon it before I wreak irreparable havoc?”

“I’m not convinced you want me to answer that. I’ll tell you precisely what I think -- if and when you’re likely to listen.”

#

There was still light enough in the thin-walled tent to watch Blake, sprawled on his belly and quiet as carrion. Noticing Cally jerk, Avon grabbed her attention before she drifted again to sleep. “But despite everything he can still sleep like a child, can't he?”

“Who?” Cally yawned. As a rule she hated waking, the tinge of loss as dreams dissolved. The disappointment that this was reality, not the world she’d painted in her head. Tonight she was glad.

“Him.” Having a fixation on Blake, Avon assumed this was self-explanatory.

“Thinking again?” she asked.

“Life appears to be too distressing for him. I was planning the details of what to do with mine once his is over.”

“He once said he finds your ferocity in clinging to life slightly obscene. What will you do, afterwards?”

“Arrange a long overdue meeting with an old enemy.”

“And then?”

Even asleep Blake’s arm hid his face from view, this twenty-four hour a day proximity agreeing with him little more than it did with Avon. The technician toyed with the twigs Blake had spent his evening mutilating. “After that,” he answered, “there is a possibility I’ll end up in the same state as he will be.”

“Life too distressing for you?”

“No. Fractionally on the pointless side.”

“I had a nightmare of Zelda’s face changing.”

“Who?”

“My twin – you’ve heard me mention her. Silly to expect you were listening.”

“I can think of nothing duller than the narcissism of a clone. Anyone like myself bores me.”

“And anyone who isn’t, you despise. Which is the lesser of the two evils?”

“At least antitheses are intriguing, because I can never work out why they exist.”

“Well, I’m not excited by conflict. I haven’t resorted to enjoying enemies due to an inhibition against enjoying friends.” She saw his lips quirk. “Anna wasn’t like you?”

“No. I mimicked her, though, as far as possible. Anna had an arrogant laugh, because she refused to be awed or saddened by anything. I tried to learn it but it eluded me. In her own way, she was as reckless as him. But her determined hedonism didn’t keep her alive after all.”

“Zelda didn’t laugh much. Everything was so grave... the political troubles. But it’s strange, I can’t remember that we were ever unhappy. Your sky is blue, too, isn’t it?”

“Blue or grey.”

“Auron was never grey. Or if it was I’ve forgotten.”

“I suspect you’ve forgotten.”

Disturbed by the voices, Blake flopped in his blanket, peered out. “Do you have an aversion to sleep?” he croaked at Avon.

“Exactly so. Or as a psych report of mine once phrased it, a fear.”

“Take something for it.”

From hovering on his feet, Avon came to kneel beside him. “It isn’t a complaint one can cure by aspirin, Blake.” He sounded conciliatory, even amused.

Cally broke in, nodding out to the night. “There’s something hanging around.”

“Animal?”

“Perhaps.” She concentrated. “Biggish.”

Avon strapped on his gun. “I’ll explore, shall I?”

“Not alone,” Blake said. “Throw me my boots.”

Outside, humid cloud had sunk to ground level. Within a foot, vision was eerily vivid, beyond that there was only the mist hemming them in. All Blake saw was Avon with the gun curbed low at his hip, muscles tense between his eyes, fringe dark and limp. Half awake, Blake followed blindly.

Then everything went out of focus. Avon was abruptly swallowed by fog -- but downwards. Next thing, Blake was falling, too, through cloud that tore like a thin net.

With a wrench the world stabilized, into a narrow crevice with slippery looking walls. He found himself being herded back on his kidneys, by a naked native with water beading in body hair. The only way out of the crevice, Blake noted, was through the native. His elbow knocked against a knee -- Avon was behind him. “He’s insane,” his shipmate hissed. “Shoot him.”

Within weedy hair the stranger’s face was piteously thin, piteously violent. His body was finely built, taut, gambolling absurdly, edging them backwards into a dead end. Once, he stilled, squatted, bared long stained teeth, screwed up his eyes and spat. Then he jumped up again, knees high, arms flailing, screaming alien abuse. The face struck a chord of sympathy in Blake, and he was reluctant to harm it. Rank sweat mingled with fresh mist his own sweat on his lips, Avon’s in his nostrils.

“Hor, hor, hor!”

“What’s that he’s calling us?”

Avon’s fingers gouged, voice dropping to that coercive intensity Blake bridled at. “Shoot the creature, will you?”

The deranged nude whipped his own face with wet hair until it must have stung, genitals swinging. Blake was on the assaulter’s side. The garbled outrage heightened. Whizzed from a crude leather slingshot, a stone ripped his shirt, scraping flesh from his ribs. So they were to be stoned by a lunatic on this world of shifting weather and religion. In three sharp bursts his gun let off. Cloud fizzled.

In the aftermath of shooting a human, Blake went limp. The harmony of Avon’s panting, the thigh lodged against his flank, were an anchor. Shutting out the corpse, he felt only the fingers still clutching him, humid breath on his neck.

“You needn’t have killed him if you were reluctant.” Avon watched his profile, content to sprawl there. The gun was clasped to Blake’s stomach.

“Perhaps,” Blake said, “he was caught in a Huda pit.”

“Superstition.”

In the deserts of Kisir Kadin, Zen had informed them, were reputed to be strange fissures in the larval rock, often hidden by sand and the crawling vines. A human falling into one of these ‘Huda’ pits almost always suffered severe brain disorder. Kisir Kadin being scientifically medieval, nothing was known of why. Avon tended to think it a bogey to keep children near camp.

”I’ll tell Cally it was a necessary kill, shall I?” inquired Avon.

“I notice you left the dirty work to me.”

“It’s your dirty work. What am I, your left hand?”

Blake chafed his temples, glanced at him. “Why are you so pale?”

Luminescent under the moons, the cloud obscured voices while giving the illusion of bringing features nearer. Blake’s trigger hand lay gracefully in his lap. Avon felt it was the part of himself Blake was most ashamed of, so he grasped the hand before admitting, “I think my ankle is broken. Pull me up.”

What Blake said was blunt. But, wrapping an arm around Avon, his body went diffident because Avon’s was sullen. Avon seemed addicted to touching him, if only to mock or threaten. In the early days it was different. Then, if Blake happened to stray too near, Avon’s sarcastic cocksureness would slip, he would go mute and panicky, a crowded wild thing. Later he lost that, and began to tread on Blake’s heels in the effort to cow him into or out of things, a habit which left Blake stifled and seething. Once, when Avon forced a confrontation in the midst of a battle, they had been thrown into each other’s grasp. There Avon kept him for the duration of the quarrel, and Blake was the discomposed one. Human touch exploited as psychological warfare — Blake hated it. Helping Avon back to the tent, he wasn’t overly gentle, assuming the technician was as blase about the trials of the flesh as he was.

Cally lashed out at him for his clumsiness. Her tongue, Blake sometimes feared, was becoming as caustic as Avon’s. The difference was, she never argued for enjoyment’s sake or held a grudge, and soon was her gracious self again, tending to Avon’s injury. For some petty reason it vexed Blake to watch. When she decided the limb would have to be reset, he spoke up. “Once I did that for friend of mine, on Earth. I’m willing to have a bash.”

“Human bone structure is dissimilar to that of the Auronar. I’ll leave it to you. Vila and I will improvise a splint.”

Blake squatted by the withdrawn Avon. “Never mind. If I muck the job up and leave you with a limp, you’ll look as swashbuckling as Travis with his eyepatch. Ah — we don’t have any pain-killers to offer you, only tender loving care.”

“Yours?”

Watching the familiar arched eyebrow, Blake told himself he shouldn’t indulge in these jokes. “Why not – you’ll be laughing at me so hard you won’t notice a thing.” However, Avon caught the bleary eye of Vila, who fumbled in his blanket and tossed a hip flask into the waiting hands. “Vila Restal --” barked Blake at the sight of the smuggled alcohol -- but answered with that sleepy winsome beam he was unable to say a cross word. Even though it was Vila who’d dropped their medikit into quicksand.

Taking a swig, Avon let his head fall back, absorbed. Curiously, Blake contemplated the tongue at parted lips. “Being rebel-in-command,” Avon explained, “you miss out on the surreptitious drinks and the lewd stories. Aside from the odd limerick.” Blake had the impression he was sweeping under the mat the evening’s references to mermen and other oddities. Which made him wonder if he’d looked suspiciously unamused. Or whether Avon took him for a puritan.

Cally washed down the matted hair of Avon’s calf. It wasn’t any business of Blake’s to wonder about her and Avon, but he thought the picture idyllic. Cally had character and to spare; if anyone were worthy of Avon she was. The thought that when he had to leave the Liberator, he would be passing him to her care, was a comforting one. Though he was probably meddling to worry about Avon, he couldn’t help himself. Avon had never been happy with the give and take of the Liberator -- he seemed to understand only all one or all the other. At times Blake too found himself longing to swing to one of the two extremes, to intemperate estrangement or intemperate familiarity, it hardly mattered which — keeping the balance of half friends, half strangers was a constant effort. Particularly in a little tent in the wilderness where you couldn’t help but touch each other. Touching, in all its manifestations, was a thorny, sensitive issue among Alphas.

“Entertain the patient,” Cally instructed Blake, and left to rip up shirts for bandaging.

“Wouldn’t one of you be more entertaining, Cally?” he called after her somewhat lamely.

“I don’t think so; he often says he finds you amusing. Tell him a story.”

“A story, eh?” Blake scratched his head. “Lewd or Alphan?” he inquired of Avon.

“I doubt it’s in you to be lewd. Then again, one advantage of being social revolutionaries is that nothing stops us from behaving like Deltas any more, does it?”

“Throw a spanner in that delicate Alpha conditioning and you might run further amuck than you bargained for. I fear Alphas probably stay Alphas for life.” A pre-dawn wind tousled Avon’s hair. “I’ll sing you a scatological song I learnt from a Gamma.”

“That does sound diverting. Just the thing to record in my memoirs of a moral crusader.”

Blake had on his mischievous look. “Here goes. Oh, a soldier told me before she died, how once there was a Sirian with a cunt so wide...”

Listening, Cally squinted up. There was no intermediary colour in the sky, only the contrast of black and winking hesitant white light. Uncertain whether or not to smile, she glanced at the pair. Although Avon didn’t smile either, Blake continued with his preposterous song. He held Avon’s eyes brashly throughout. They were spoilt by the soma. It left them looking gluttonous as he drank, feeding off Blake with a wary but shameless expression. At the last line he said lazily, “I’m flattered by the performance. Who was this Gamma?”

Unconsciously, Avon’s fingers were running along his thigh, and Blake felt low upon catching himself watch them. “My friend with the leg. Long dead.”

“So you did have a friend once? Or do you merely mean he was one of your followers -- like Jenna?”

“Jenna is the least follower-like rebel I’ve met. And Stev was as dear a friend as I’ve had.” Blake’s mouth was dry for a sip of that beautifully appalling soma, but he didn’t ask.

“In the Freedom Party, was he? He must have been a carbon copy of you; you wouldn’t have patience for anything else. Conversed in ideologically sound slogans, did you?”

“No, he was a skeptical joker who made devastating comments when I got too enthusiastic. Odd looking character -- small, great gnarled hands, rugged face but with an impish smile. Had a genius for gut wisdom, he looked after me. Thick Gamma accent and never shut his mouth. Also a shameless flirt.”

“Went to a hero’s grave?”

“Classic hero’s death, I’m afraid.”

“Shot clean on the battlefield?” Avon pressed, with unhealthy preoccupations.

If he was going to entertain Avon, he might as well go all out — there was a chance it might be appreciated. “Clean isn’t the word I’d use, but my gun was only two inches away.”

Fascinated, but not liking to ask for details, Avon said, “Indeed?”

“It was on a raid, you see, he caught a bullet in the spine. The raid was his brainchild, it backfired but we got his precious equipment. Stev was a technician -- not computers -- he had a passion for this particular gadget, been after it for months. Things were falling apart, he had no choice but to suicide. No one is willingly taken alive by the Federation. But he was paralyzed, couldn’t move at all. So I did it for him.” Blake all but grinned. “Morbid, isn’t it?”

“At least,” Avon said, “you had the chance for last messages. It can be frustrating if you don’t.”

“And if you do they haunt you forever. I promised to give myself hell for doing it. Stev said I always gave myself hell, and it never stopped me -- so maybe I deserved it. Though he did say something more sentimental after that. And got someone to push me away. My skull was too close and might have fried too.” Blake had a faintly vindictive urge to make an impression. “That’s one memory that broke through the treatment. Aside from that I recall little enough of Stev. I never quite got his last name. The face is vivid, these two years I expect I’ve made half the rest of him up. In my situation, you never quite know if you’re remembering or imagining.” Unguarded, he added, “But I think he was everything to me.”

Heat made Avon’s complexion colourless and pure. “My brother’s name was Fyfe. One of your noble types, you would have liked him.”

“Look like you, did he?”

Avon gave an easy smile, the like of which no one would catch him with sober. “The same features, but mine were a black sheep’s. His were ancestral Avon features, less fleshy and mutable -- my brother was abnormally handsome. How did your song go again?”

“It’s a cruel song.”

“Tell me the last bit again.”

Blake obliged, while Avon nodded seriously.

Tangerine, ruby, lilac appeared in the sky. Cally frowned. Kisir Kadin no longer felt so foreign. In the dawn, sand and sky were awesome, whereas before Cally had found them grotesque. With beauty, anything ceases to be alien or repellent. No, she thought then, that’s only illusion. Still, Blake was singing a song he thought cruel merely to please Avon, who unlike his brother was only mildly beautiful. Avon was drunkenly enchanted.

By now he was also fortified, and Blake explored the ankle with his capable hands. It gave him the creeps — there was nothing so eerie as human flesh gone wrong. One never quite believed a human could damage as easily as any inanimate thing. It violated some fundamental security. “Somebody shut my eyes,” Vila whimpered.

“Yes, somebody shut his eyes.” Avon hated the sympathy. Though Cally held his hand he watched only Blake, who was unembarrassed at witnessing or undergoing pain. “Tell them to let me alone.”

“Cally, we’ll need firewood,” Blake suggested. She led Vila off.

Eyeing Blake uneasily, Avon looked vulnerable hunched in his jacket. His shoulders ludicrously thin, hair tousled and damp, chin furry with stubble. “You realize,” he said with slurred precision, “I haven’t contacted my brother since he left my temple purple. The right to hurt me was the only one I hadn’t granted him.”

Winking, Blake braced his shoulders and pulled. Avon whipped his head from side to side in a fury.

#

His tongue was thick and sour. Collecting saliva, he spat.

“Water will help the hangover.” A hand supported his head as he gulped greedily, and Avon didn’t mind it until Blake continued, “I’ll leave Cally to look after you until we find civilization.”

As though slighted, Avon twitched away. Blake was amused by the sulky cast of his mouth. After slow thought Avon deigned to look at him again. “Mistake to drink all that water.”

“Ah. Come on, then.” Blake cloaked himself in efficiency. “Well, come on,” he prodded as Avon kneaded his cheekbones. Feeling tacky because he wasn’t alone, Avon used him as a crutch.

Avon felt safe in his helplessness only insofar as it tied Blake to him, incapacitating Blake as well. While Blake was here Avon could take advantage of it; and with an arm anxiously glued to Avon’s waist Blake couldn’t be his threateningly rambunctious self. After all, Blake was a sucker for the halt and lame, and wasn’t nearly as interested when Avon was whole and independent. So the technician leant heavily with an arm across his shoulders, and felt correspondingly more powerful as Blake, flattered, became supportive.

“You could always take both of them,” Avon said. “Instead of leaving me in this position with Cally.” He unzipped his trousers. “I don’t like being dependent.”

“Avon, there’s a universe-wide network of dependent things and you’re in it.” But a shy warm grin lurked about his mouth, unquashable.

“I won’t have her helping me.” He held Blake’s eyes, which were close, as he hadn’t let go. Blake had expected him to be defensive, but Avon thrived on undignified situations, which were exploitable if you were more at home in them than the other person. Blake felt an illicit fascination.

“What’s the difference? I’ll begin to suspect you of mild xenophobia.” The patter of urine on sand was lulling, and combined with the stillness of the dawn, extinguished all sense of time. Underhand as it may sound, Blake knew he would privately cherish the scene. “Besides, Cally’s kinder than me.”

“At least among aliens, Cally’s too fragile for me to be as well.”

Blake’s fingers stole tighter round his ribs at Avon calling himself fragile. “Nonsense, she’s the stablest of us all.”

“I won’t have looking-after-Avon delegated like mess room duty. I can fend for myself, you know.”

“Aren’t you glad to be out of my clutches for a few days? My clutches aren’t healthy for you, I’m glad you’re out of them.” Besides, his reactions were growing confused with this surface intimacy. It would be easy to get too fond of this Avon, resenting the world for his leg and clinging possessively to Blake’s shoulder. But that was mere cowardice. Facing the uncertainty of the near future, Blake was grateful for anything familiar -- even this most troublesome of his crewmates -- and was in a clinging mood himself.

Avon swayed against the sturdy chest. “I’m either going to faint or throw up.”

“No, you’re not,” Blake laughed, panicking about what to do with the dark head on his collarbone. “Look -- do yourself up.” Bland velvet eyes met his a moment as he steadied Avon away from him. “Make yourself decent.”

He fumbled at his trousers but said, “I despise your decency, Blake.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“You want honesty at the same time. One of the two has to go, you know, because truth is never particularly pretty. And, of the two, I value honesty more. You’re quite like my brother.”

“I can’t imagine being compared to a relation of yours... Let me take you back before you fall all over me.”

“It’s his white hair reminds me of you. Of course, he wasn’t so endearingly dumb.”

“I do not have white hair.”

“Whenever I longed to be honest I”d look at the whiteness of it. And stay mute out of decency. He was as Alpha as you remain, Blake, despite your aberrant ideas. Why don’t you let Cally and Vila go find your religious sect?”

Blake was startled. He snorted softly, and changed his grip to Avon’s elbow. “I have to keep a hold of what’s left for me, Avon.”

“What is left for you?”

“Monomania,” he smiled. “As for that nebulous thing which I’m told is called a personal life, they’ve robbed me of so much of it I wouldn’t know how to have one anymore. But I still have my beliefs, they give me purpose, keep me from brooding. I can’t spare much concentration for anything else, I don’t want to be left with absolutely nothing.”

Avon gave no answer.

#

Thinking was detrimental to his temper.

“And if you were on the ship,” Cally countered, “would you run out?”

“Blake must be convinced of it, to put up with my company when he could have had Jenna here instead. There are only three possible deterrents to abandoning him. A sensitive conscience, a submissive nature, or Jenna’s: a wish to wrestle him to the flight deck floor. None of which he can conceivably attribute to me, so how can he possibly go on assuming I won’t run out?”

Left in private with Avon in the tent, Cally would persist with these debates for hours. “You insist on over-simplifying people’s motives. And downgrading them. So when it comes to understanding your own you have to tack the lowest names on them and believe the unnecessary worst of yourself. You’re a cynic about yourself, too.”

“What does that mean?”

“The fact that you’re reluctant to desert him worries you. You have to rationalize it by inventing an acceptably sordid and ungenerous reason to stay. Whereas actually it’s probably simple friendship.”

“Friendship is profitless.”

“When you’ve found something further to exploit him for, you’ll be happier about hanging around. You know, if you weren’t so anxious to hide everything, you wouldn’t have to be afraid of yourself.”

“I suppose you miss Jenna, too,” he said -- to see the veiling of her eyes.

#

Cally had never been to Earth. From gossip and video she had built up an image of it as one vast sterile urban machine. Rigid, impersonal, comprising billions of isolated units, many of which were only nominally human. Inevitable, therefore, that the humans she knew should be so crude in their attempts to communicate. Uneasy with and ignorant of their own human qualities. Their reticence left her feeling a freak, hanging on every measly word. Frustrated, caged in her skull. Although it was a fact that Auronar deprived of telepathic feedback had mental disturbance and suicide rates higher than the average, it was also a fact that most of these humans she lived with were more psycho-emotionally deprived and self-destructive than she. Cally felt healthy by comparison -- at least she came from a sane world.

The pitch black was like a witchcraft, giving delusions. Jenna, where is your easy camaraderie now, your company which is the only thing that keeps me from parasitizing wherever I can? No Auron was meant to think alone for years. By the time I see one of my own species again I’ll be a psychic criminal, snatching, invading, desensitized, deranged.

Avon had fallen asleep, one hand outflung against her foot. Cally stared until her eyes watered but could only sense it there. Nothing moved. She hovered just beyond his haphazard thoughts. Loitering with intent on the edge of the shadows, on the edge of the rainbow light. Unless she drew away from the unwitting hand her mind would not untangle from his. His mind was less than beautiful to her. Yet she grappled it stubbornly, clumsily, like a soldier hugging a kicking enemy child. Nothing was moving and she was loathe to move. He was asleep, he wasn’t aware.

Before she slept, the black had begun to liquefy.

#

“While Anna was with me,” he said, “I understood myself. But now, I no longer know what she’d make of me.”

This way of life, meaningful relationships were so rare that everyone was obsessed with dead ones. Which, with the continual rehashing, took on tortuous significances.

“As for your understanding,” Avon continued, “things slip into my mind you wouldn’t consent to listen to at all. While Blake may not have the commonsense to stop me -- but he wouldn’t believe them.”

“So you’re going to lock yourself away from the world.”

“I’m going to lock the world away from me. Build myself a stronghold of a planet, safe as a Federation prison, luxurious as the president’s mansion.”

She shook her straggly curls. “You’re like a spoilt child. Banishing from sight everything that disappoints you, until you’ve only four walls and a mirror to stare at.”

“The mirror might be the first to go. Also, I’ll kick out whom I like. Keep in whom I like -- choose the company I keep for once. None of this random element you gamble on with biological entities -- my interface with people will be under my control and managed logically, too.”

“You mean,” said Cally, “your prison is to lock people in as well as out? Whom will you cage there?”

He shot her a dirty look.

#

Cally flung down the animals, flicking open her knife to gut them. He watched her compelling eyes and pronounced jawline as she peeled away fur.

At times Cally usurped his place on the Liberator as resident misanthropist. Her capacity to disapprove of him along with the others piqued Avon. She could stay mute and private for longer than he managed. And that scared him, in a complex way. The freedom fighter was tougher than him, lonelier than him -- and she saw through his lone wolf act like misted glass, roughly scrubbing a hole and peering through to the crazed need for company even he was only partially aware of. She knew, she knew precisely how resilient his sanity was, how many years longer he could take this emotional drought which had parched him since Anna’s death. Though both suffered from the same malaise, she knew that his inhibited Terran desperation was more corrosive than her liberated Auron desperation, and because of it her trust of him had a definite limit. That was the exasperating part, that this mournful alien in her impossible situation pitied him in his worse one. While knowing she could weather the isolation for twenty more years, and die in misery maybe, but never in madness.

Avon could hate her, her wisdom and her tensile strength and particularly her empathy. He was always afraid she would give him away, perhaps in some stray comment to Blake -- _He’s ashamed to ask for anything, feeling he has nothing worthwhile to give_ , or, _Don’t give him the metal and the fabric of the ship, Blake, give him the respect and attention and credence he thinks will only come with owning the ship, with owning wealth_ , or, _You, who gather lost souls to you, who collect a ship of rejects with nowhere else to go — you fight for the dirtiest dumbest Delta slave, but you fight against him, you love all humankind, all humankind but him_ \-- Parroting morbid ramblings direct from his brain, because telepathy had no notion of lies as a protective husk, no concept of the terror of peeling away the skin so the sun hits inside where it blazes like acid, as in eyes sunk in a dark dungeon for life. Because a telepath thinks sick what was natural for Avon, for Terrans; because a telepath meddles. There were so many secrets for the tactless Cally to betray. He only knew that because to keep track of what she was seeing in him, he had to look, and he didn’t appreciate the self-knowledge.

Used to warrior fare, Cally passed him a negligible hunk of the roasted meat. “Are you trying to starve me into submission?” he asked ungraciously.

“I don’t kill unnecessarily. We can live comfortably on these two animals. Besides, you’ve a fever.”

Indeed, perhaps he was a touch delirious, caught by her huge, omniscient eyes. “I think you just like to leech the strength from me.”

Cally’s temper frayed. “Avon, you come of an immature species. And why are you so petrified of leaning on me?”

“If I leant on you, we’d both fall down. You’ve a tough facade, Cally.”

“Then we’re alike in that.”

“If so, you’d better stop trying to poke holes in both, hadn’t you?”

#

Dirty and gaunt, Avon sat awkwardly, gun trained on the native who had materialized in the mouth of the tent. An olive scarecrow in scrappy blue cloth tied with a tassel, nothing on his horny feet. Long greasy hair braided to the hips. Near-human, spare, graceful.

“You can skip the welcoming ceremony.” Blake appeared, easy and jovial. He touched the stranger, near the waist. “Kuvvetli’s a friend.”

No answer, no wavering of the gun from the native’s belly. Blake put his hands on his hips, quizzical, and came to disarm Avon manually. “What’s the matter?”

He relinquished the gun. “Nothing.”

“Kuvvetli’s going to heal your ankle with psychic energy.” And the rebel gave a jolly grin.

Avon digested this statement. “Blake, you didn’t fall into any Huda pits along the way, did you?”

“Have a little faith, Avon. Kuvvetli promises me it’s possible.”

Taking Avon’s foot without permission, the Kisiri began unwrapping bandages. His eyes were arresting. Plum coloured, liquid in the dry skin, a touch sultry. Blue veins riddled his arms. His mouth, which hadn’t yet opened, was full but somehow unkind, a dusky pink. Under the lank black hair his face was symmetrical, sternly beautiful. Or at least Blake appeared to think so. He hung around the Kisiri at a deferential distance, much taken with his find.

As Blake and the scarecrow conferred apart, Avon murmured to Vila, “What’s with this Kuvvetli?”

“He’s the Ulus prophet. The leader of this mystic rebel sect we came all this way to negotiate with. He hit Blake like the broadside of a pursuit ship. Blake thinks he’s the most amazing thing since Gabash the Messiah of Eridani Nine, and is quite determined he’s going to cure your leg.”

“I see.”

Kuvvetli took a palmful of dried herbs from a pouch, crushed them and inhaled their scent. Perfectly still, he knelt with closed eyes. Avon asked Blake, “What’s your witch doctor doing now -- invoking spirits from the other world?”

“It’s known as meditation, Avon. He does quite a bit of it.”

“Do tell me he’s not going to stare significantly into my eyes and chant strange incantations. I don’t think I could keep a straight face.”

“He puts you to sleep, that’s all. You won’t know a thing.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. Blake, come off it, he’s as potty as the last Kisiri we met.”

“You have far too narrow a mind, Avon. Don’t knock what you haven’t tried.”

“If I regret this, you will regret this. I suffer it merely to say I told you so.”

Two other Kisiris had trekked back to the tent with Blake and Vila. One, Blake introduced as Kuvvetli’s older brother, Mustakim. Heavier of bone and slower of eye than his prophet brother, he looked much more down to earth, but nevertheless trailed on Kuvvetli’s heels with quiet adoration. “And that’s Hediye, Kuvvetli’s widow,” Blake nodded. Said Hediye, a lean woman carving an arrow for her bow, was being chatted up by Vila.

“Widow?” asked Avon.

“That’s her official status. Shortly after bonding, Kuvvetli found he couldn’t deny his vocation, so took an oath of chastity.”

“Ah, it’s that kind of religion.”

“Their monotheism is elegantly simple. In banning it the Federation has ruled out a whole gamut of experience. As I see it, the cornerstone of their belief is that there’s such a thing as wrong. Where in that do they differ from we reformists?”

“I’m out to survive, I don’t want to hear about wrong.”

Blake’s eyes forsook Avon as Kuvvetli woke from his trance and joined them. The technician mentioned helpfully, “If you’re one of these faith healer types, I ought to warn you, faith isn’t one of my stronger points.”

“Faith healers,” confided Kuvvetli, “use more delusion than faith.” He looked as though his voice should be velvet, but it was harsh.

“I can see where the delusion comes in.”

“Tricking the mind. Do you believe in delusion?”

“Religiously.”

“And do you believe your mind can be deluded?”

“I can’t promise anything, since it hasn’t happened yet.”

“With that capacity for faith to work with, what couldn’t I do?” Kuvvetli laid the injured foot in his lap. “As Roj told you, however, I don’t work with credulity games, but with mental energy.”

“I’d keep away from this one; I suspect he’s cleverer than you are,” Avon drawled to Blake.

Probing the ankle, Kuvvetli said, “It was set slightly crooked.”

“That’s the last time I trust to Blake’s wonky perspective.”

“Stop whinging. I said I’d bring you medical assistance, didn’t I?”

That, Avon felt, was beneath comment. Besides, he was unaccountably drowsy, face heavy in the pillow of his jacket, contemplating Blake contemplate Kuvvetli. His eyes were playing tricks on him. The smile Blake gave the priest seemed to last for long minutes; it was as though Blake were telling the Kisiri whispered things, with the curves of his mouth and the changes in the skin about his eyes. Avon slept, to dream –

#

Between the soles of his feet, Kuvvetli balanced a long wooden pipe with a cracked bowl, which he stuffed with tobacco rubbed in his palms. Lighting the pipe, he glanced at Avon from the comer of his dark-lashed eye. The curiosity wasn’t friendly. Smoke weaved, pearly, between them, but it didn’t dilute the intensity of the purple-black gaze.

“You’re healed,” Kuvvetli said.

With elaborate care Avon flexed his toes, his knees, his ankle. He flattened his hand and belted the injured joint. There was not so much as a twinge to complain of. “You’re right, you know.”

“I know.”

Avon considered the implications of this. “Have you thought what a hit you could be with a party trick like that? You could found a religious cult. With a bit of cunning PR they’ll mistake you for some kind of prophet.”

“I don’t often heal. It isn’t what people are hurt for, to be cured in minutes. Quick healing is a lie, it solves nothing.”

“What was I hurt for, then?”

“I can’t tell. Perhaps as an answer. Have you asked any questions lately?”

“And why did you heal me if you don’t believe in it?”

“Roj Blake asked it of me.”

Limping unnecessarily, Avon located Blake, who crouched stirring the evening soup over a campfire. The rebel grinned to see him. “So the spirits from the other world looked kindly upon you?”

“A diverting freak of science. How did you know he could actually do it?”

“He told me so. I take people as truthful until proved to be lying.”

“You didn’t believe he could at all, did you?”

A noncommittal eyebrow rose. “Anyway, he passed that test. Think, Avon, how much he must know, how wise he must be, with that kind of psychic power.”

“I realise you’ve only taken it into your head to champion religion because they’ve outlawed it, so I won’t hold it too much against you. However, I do insist you admit Kuvvetli’s a superstition-riddled little fanatic from a medieval society.”

“There’s more to him than that.”

Avon rolled his eyes. “Yes; a beguiling face.”

The rebel looked quickly up at him. His curls were an inky tangle, and his glance was as covert and inscrutable as an animal’s before it slinks back into the undergrowth.

“You’re far too easily beguiled, Blake.”

#

This confidant was more to Blake’s taste. He and Kuvvetli sat up, passing the cracked wooden pipe between them, immersed in debate -- life after death, from the snatches Avon heard. Until the early hours Avon lay breathing the pungent smoke. He hadn’t known Blake liked talking so exhaustively. And until Blake had the presumption to choose someone else to do it to, Avon had had little motivation to listen. He considered Blake’s absurdities his own property -- not to be thrown away on a passing acquaintance.

The Kisiri priest was promising Blake that humans had being beyond the corporeal, that physical life was only one phase of existence, in fact the least evolved stage. “Isn’t it a teaching of your science,” Kuvvetli said, “that no energy and no matter ever ceases to exist -- it just transforms? It would be absurd to think that your essence, your self dissipates into nothing, alone of all things. Not so much as an atom has disappeared since the beginning of time, yet you, Roj, are afraid that you will disappear.”

Obviously Blake _was_ afraid, to be listening to this, arguing as though it truly mattered. “Precisely, Kuvvetli – I’m just one of the chance formations of those atoms, which will continue on in other formations once I am no longer.”

“Split this pipe into its component atoms and you no longer have a pipe. Split your flesh into its component atoms and there still remains that “I” you cannot help but mention, your psyche, which is not composed of material atoms...”

Pathetic, Avon thought -- is Blake in as bad a way as that? Him and his premonition of martyrdom – he’d be long buried if the Federation hadn’t seen the dangers of making him a martyr, so he has an obsession that this leech of a universe will profit from his untimely demise -- and though he resents that bitterly the fool won’t resist it. If he stoutly believes he’s going to die before long, then yes, he probably is in as bad a way as that. I ought to know. His cherished Star One scheme is no more suicidal than my own scheme, the fate I’ve been avidly designing for myself... and the time for elaborate planning, for sour-sweet anticipation is running out, we’ll have to actually go through with our quasi-suicides within a month or three. That will test our mettle. Which of us will be the first to get cold feet?

Groping for comfort in the face of death Avon understood. But this abstract comfort Blake was getting from his priest -- it was worse than useless, a travesty. Blake didn’t want help, or consolation; he wanted resignation, he wanted to trick his will to live into subjugation -- lie quiet until it’s over, I can scientifically prove death doesn’t matter. That must be it, or he’d be seeking real comfort, in the tangible world, with real warm people. No, instead of clinging to life while it lasted, Blake trampled on his natural human instincts and discussed spirits.

Disgruntled, Avon wished Blake a whale of a good time in his future existence as a pure spirit-being. Meanwhile, he himself could do with more earthy comfort -- even the clasp of sympathetic fingers -- only there was no one to give it.

In the morning he buttonholed Blake before the rebel had a chance to wake up properly. “Who converted whom last night?”

“No one,” came a groggy mumble from the crook of his arm.

“Immortality,” Avon jeered gently. “I’ve never met anyone so haplessly mortal as you. Nor anyone more likely to get himself killed -- and stay killed. Your newfound admirer won’t change that.”

Blake peeped out, a wistful look competing with the familiar early morning scowl. “But imagine if it were true, Avon — it would compensate for so many things. There would be method behind the madness of life. He says every being is learning, evolving towards a perfect state. Almost like an allegory for what we’re doing, reforming society, civilising it. Ridding ourselves of impurity.”

“Purity is not a naturally occurring state in this universe, and perfection is a concept far beyond the grasp of humans. In short, there’s nothing too much wrong with you the way you are.”

Blake smiled, as though he’d been pleasurably anticipating this conversation. “You mean, let’s be content with what we are?”

“Certainly, with people as they stand, complete with selfishness, greed and craziness. I don’t want to change the race. I don’t even want to change you -- anyone who does, who thinks your essence could do with some purifying, is no friend to you.”

“They’d be more of a friend, I would have thought, if ambitious for you and interested in bringing out your best,” Blake parried lightly, but he was pondering on whether that was a hint of acceptance from Avon.

“Well, for myself, those one or two people I’ve cared about have been quite as imperfect as the species as a whole. And I liked the worst in them as much as I liked the best. I’m not so fastidious as you.”

“I don’t know...” Blake linked his arms about his knees. “I’m rather too fond of humans the way they are, too.”

“You could have fooled me, with your propensity for self-mutilation. Or self-punishment, if you prefer. Obviously you’re not so happy with the imperfect way you are.”

Blake’s smile wavered. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Balanced on his heels, Avon threaded his belt through its loops. _“Blake’s but a walking shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his hours upon the stage and then is heard no more_. That is the proverbial that. However, there are ways of dealing with it, you know. Being all in the same boat is a help. _But oh, the very reason why I clasp them, is because they die_.”

“Don’t show off, I had a classical education too.”

“You don’t want Kuvvetli’s non-material plane, which is beyond human imagination anyway. You only want to hang onto your vulgar humanity. Isn’t that so?” He lilted, _“Your chilly stars I can forgo, this warm kind world is all I know. Show me what angels feel — till then, I cling, a mere weak man, to men_.”

“Oh, since when?”

“The poem’s yours, not mine. _You bid me lift my mean desires to sexless souls, ideal choirs. My mind with fonder welcome owns one dear dead friend’s remembered tones_.”

“That’s enough poetry for one morning,” Blake said between his teeth. Suspicious of the juxtaposition of _one dear dead friend_ and _mean desires_. He knew he’d said too much about Stev. To hear Stev’s voice again, even his most nonsensical chatter or his cruellest truths – wouldn’t that be more meaningful to him than any profound thing Kuvvetli could say? And a long, soft kiss from Stev would be more calming than all the philosophy in the galaxy. Kuvvetli was in the habit of holding hands with his comrades, but that lean dry palm in his own was it. And Alphas never touched.

“Anyway,” Avon said, “it’s your romanticism Kuvvetli appeals to, not your puritanism.”

“Eh? Avon, go away, for pity’s sake, it’s seven in the morning. Where are the days you refused to say two words in a row to me?”

“Nostalgic?”

“I can’t think with these squabbles going on. You at least used to keep aloof.”

“Which squabbles?”

Blake didn’t answer, but inquired in an accusatory tone, “Why was Cally so moody yesterday?”

“Pining for the communion of psyches of home, probably, and going stoically batty among aliens. I’m not answerable for Cally’s moods, am I?”

“I don’t know, I can never figure you pair out. But I leave you alone and when I come back you’re behaving with each other like sulky children. Cally has one of the evenest tempers I know, so it follows you must be pretty damn provoking. Whose is the problem?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

Blake had heard that line before. “So you always say to me,” he half laughed, levered on an elbow, “when it comes to talking about women you like.”

That amused the technician. “Ah. You’re on the wrong track, Blake -- Cally would never sink to the likes of me.”

“I see. Well, if that’s your problem, would you handle it by yourself, please?”

Avon’s voice was silky innocence. “I’m hardly asking you to handle it for me.”

Blake grimaced, plonked down again and jammed the blanket over his head.

Presently Avon continued, “Even in the state you’re in, your old ambition to save humanity wouldn’t be contented by simply helping a friend who needs it more.”

Emerging from his blanket, Blake buried a hand in his hair. “Look -- Kerr.” It was the one and only time he’d used Avon’s personal name. Avon was drily amazed he remembered it. Blake licked his lips. “I’m sorry. Personal relations just seem a bit of a morass to me. It isn’t that I’m insensible -- too far from it. I just discourage easily, you have to give me a chance or three.”

“I was referring to Cally. Roj.”

Translucent, staring eyes snapped up. The lines of pigment looked like scratches, dozens of small abrasions. “I’ll talk to Cally.” Blake yearned to add, _You_ _bastard_ , but that sounded too like disappointment.

A smile lurked on Avon’s face, but it was as flammable as Blake’s bruised eyes. The hatred in which made Avon want to lean towards the mouth -- not to touch it with his lips but rather his teeth. But if he bit at the fleshiness there he might next want to thrust against sleep-soft Blake through his clothes, in his too-mortal too-human frightened arms, hugging him grimly.

Avon hadn’t imagined becoming unhinged was such an entertaining process. Mad as a hatter, mad as Blake, bizarre. Still, it was quite a kick -- the moment of unalloyed, uncontrolled communication he’d provoked between them. As a rule they used satire as a shield against each other. It was intoxicating when the satire ran thin. Avon gave the rebel quite a kind, knowing look as he left.

#

The Ulus, Kuvvetli’s tribe of desert-dwelling radicals, was camped only fifty kilometres from Chingis, which was the major city of Kisir Kadin. A flimsy shelter of stitched-together goatskins, where Kuvvetli and his family slept, was the hub of social life in the bivouac. Here fifty people gathered to debate the details of the assassinations Blake proposed.

“So far,” said Kuvvetli’s brother, Mustakim, “protest has been confined to street warfare in Chingis. Sporadic clashes between Federation partisans and nationalists.”

An old Kisiri with a rag swathing her head tried driving her goats through the open tent. Kuvvetli spoke quietly and she drove them out again, pausing to kiss one of the priest’s greasy locks.

“We have to differentiate,” Blake was saying, “between violence that will make an impression and violence that will simply make a mess. Though it does to be gruesome, create a spectacle people won’t forget. I say we go for this foreign Kommissar they’ve installed, Nav Rul. And for emotional impact we go for your Shah, who agreed to the occupation of his planet. Just two killings, and we create more devastation than years of gang attrition.”

Kuvvetli unrolled a parchment hand-inked map of Chingis.

At two in the morning the crowd dispersed. It had been agreed that Mustakim would be the Shah’s assassin, and Blake would be Kommissar Nav Rul’s. Tomorrow the Liberator crew and a handful of Kisiris, led by Kuvvetli, Mustakim and Hediye, would begin on foot for Chingis. The foreigners would then wait beyond the city until the Kisiris found a hiding place within its walls. Immediately after the assassinations the Ulus party would retreat to the desert, and the Liberator crew to their ship.

Blake had taken to spending his nights in Kuvvetli’s tent. He missed working in the Freedom Party, the old underground on Earth; it was good to be living in a rebel community again. When Cally returned from the meeting to the crew’s tent, Vila was yelling, “I’m not your creature! Your whims are going to take you over the edge.”

“Got your money’s worth out of me and now you want out?”

“I don’t want no trouble. I was looking after myself for years before you came along, you know. Why can’t I get by without bullies?”

“It must be some deficiency in your psychological make-up,” answered Avon.

“You think you can lock ten million in your cabin and lock me out? I’ve still got the old fingers, you know.”

Here Avon drew his gun. Cally noticed how gracefully he did such things. “Vila, Vila,” he crooned. “I’m too fond of you to let you make such a dangerous blunder.”

The thief was panting, mesmerised by the tip of the translucent shaft. It wavered slightly with Avon’s fingers. Vila knew the fight was all staged — theatre was a favourite hobby of Avon’s. Not yet certain of the point, he continued to say his lines. Avon was waiting for them, eyes patient but prompting.

Yanking out his own gun he said, “Playing the Klute was my brainwave. And it was my skin which nearly fried. Those winnings are mine, which adds up to seven-point-five million for me and two-point-five for you.”

“That’s enough.” Cally grabbed the thief with thin commanding hands. Next thing Avon was there, twisting Vila’s fingers round the gun. “Drop it, or you won’t still have the old fingers.”

Avon’s getting hammy, Vila thought. While Cally snapped, “Avon, let him go.”

“Why don’t you go tell on me to Roj?”

The conduct of these Terrans was not her worry, particularly in a ho-hum fracas over money. It was Blake’s crew, let Blake bawl them out. So she marched out. At Vila’s distressed whimper Avon dropped the hand. “Blake spends his nights abusing his brain trying to fathom theology, gets an hour’s sleep, then chews us out all day because he’s too tired to see straight. Even tags along when his monk goes off praying or scourging himself or whatever these types are into. Good luck to Cally if she means to get a look in.” Then he added, a throwaway line, “Sorry about the hand. I didn’t do any damage.”

“You’re ruining us,” Vila hissed. The whole idea was to play dumb about the ten million. What are you playing at, letting Blake in on it?”

“Have a little faith.”

As soon as Blake appeared Vila stabbed an arm at the culprit, hoping to win Blake’s sympathy as the lesser of two evils. “He’s cheating me. He broke my fingers.” Blake glanced to Avon, who was poised with arms wrapped over his stomach in the shadows. “Let me look after the credits, keep them in my cabin, they’ll be safer from Blake there, he says.”

“Safer from me, eh? Does he kid himself he’s above suspicion?”

“No,” Avon explained reasonably. “It’s just that Vila’s the socially popular type. Everyone traipses through his cabin. Whereas I could mass murder or slit my wrists in my cabin and, having never been near it in two years, you wouldn’t know a thing was going on.” His quiet brown eyes never left Blake.

Abstractedly, Blake looked at the floor. He heaved his sturdy shoulders. “I’m not up to untangling this now. You pair can confess what illicit mischief you’ve been up to in the morning. Avon, is it such a complex thing for you to get on with someone for a change? Vila will behave himself.”

“Me behave?” squeaked Vila. Avon had just launched a successful coup for Blake’s sympathy.

“No more trouble, all right, Avon?” the rebel pressed.

“That sounds like a plea.”

“Hell, if a plea is what you’re fishing for, I’m not above one at this time of night.”

Graciously Avon echoed, “All right,” because the power of taking the creases from Blake’s brow was as interesting as that of putting them there. At that, Blake loosened, all the way down from his tense shoulders.

“You’re not abandoning me to his clutches again just like that,” Vila protested.

The technician agreed, “It would be risky, I might have a homicidal fit during the night.”

Blake had loosened too far. The emotional build-up was plain on his face. “Look, you’re my people, how about a little understanding from you? I’m dead tired, I have a lot on my mind, I need some peace --” He gestured randomly, shut up, and after a moment swung to Vila. “Take your things to Kuvvetli’s family tent, then.”

Vila gathered his belongings together – with stoic dignity, he thought. Blake glanced at Cally. Her wide mouth was steadfast, but she radiated forlornness -- unless it was just himself, projecting. Aware that both she and Avon waited, uncomfortable with the arrangement, he hesitated. Avon was fiddling with his gun, testing the tensility of the shaft. Blake lashed out, “Would you please put the blessed thing where it belongs? Do you have a Freudian complex?” And watched Avon holster it precisely, as he did everything, at the point of his hip, with an enigmatic flicker of the eyebrow.

Blake couldn’t very well leave now. Plumping to the ground he added to Vila, “And bring my blankets back here, you can take my place. Shuffled about like a deck of cards this time in the morning. If you keep both paws and thoughts a decent distance from Kuvvetli’s widow. Try and cultivate a little moral fibre.” So Vila trotted off happily enough, faith in Avon restored. The outcome was tailor-made for them both -- though since when Avon had become so fussy over whom he slept with Vila didn’t know. Blake alone felt the worse off for the change.

Still limping, though only when Blake was around to get cross at the inference, Avon said, “Sorry duty calls you away from pleasure, Roj.” To have a set of teeth bared at him.

It was easy to manoeuvre Blake into a nightcap. “Wouldn’t get this in your monk’s tent,” said Avon, pouring it.

Darning a rip in his shirt, Blake scowled over his needle. Cally was changing and, being genteel, he faced the other way. Avon didn’t bother. “Kuvvetli isn’t a prude,” Blake said. “He’s merely constructing himself into something he feels is better than his raw nature.”

“And you’d know about artificial construction. How much raw nature did the psycho-butchers leave in you?”

“Avon, you preach to me at least as dogmatically as I preach to you.”

The Auron disappeared for her pre-sleep wander in the night air. Unable to let Blake alone, Avon answered off-handedly, “It’s only my jealousy.”

Blake pricked his thumb. He made a show of involved swearing before adding politely, “Sorry -- what was that?”

“Have a drop more wine,” Avon smiled.

“Not for me. Matter of fact I’m trying to keep away from it. Not too consistently, I’m afraid.” There was no backlash to the admission, so Blake asked vaguely, “Were we talking about something?”

“Were we? What?”

“I’ve forgotten.”

“Can’t have been important then.” Avon unrolled his blanket next to Blake’s.

The rebel ground his teeth then said, “Jealousy, was it?

“Ah, that was it,” Avon’s memory returned. “I’m jealous of your followers, because they’re twisting your mind in knots. That was going to be my hobby, puncturing that enormous confidence you used to have and mutating you to a bitter old cynic like me. But, by the time the rebellion is through with you, there’ll be nothing left to get my sadistic glee from.”

“You think not? Blake looked to him, asking, unwise, a touch ridiculous. His fingertips traced a scar on his bare arm. This one was a smooth white line, not like a blemish at all, crossing the muscle and petering out where the dark hair began under his arm. Avon knew what it was from; it had happened on Sevda. He had been there. Watching the rebel work on his shirt, Avon was washed with a kind of futile pity. Blake was too far gone, all negativity these past weeks, courting death, only courting people or things that weren’t healthy for him. Perhaps the fellow hated himself. It looked like he, Avon, had to compete with a death wish for possession of Blake. So that’s my rival, he thought, from which, out of nothing more than some strange fellow-feeling, I’m going to win you. Cunningly. You’re going to listen to me, trust yourself to me. Which means I’ll have to fall in with this negative mood of yours, otherwise I’ll never get your attention. Come and court your destruction in me instead of them, because I after all was only ever playing at it, while they are deadly serious. See, I’ll even indulge your masochism, just to keep it from running wild. The weird circuitous ways I find of taking care of you, Blake.

“Unless I get in first,” Avon resumed where he’d left off. Unhooking his gun belt, he hoisted it casually. “You know, I can shoot as straight as the average Federation trooper. If you’re really resigned to going out in a blaze of glory, why not right here and now? It would save us further trouble and danger, and save you the anguish of waiting. If you’re serious about it, that is.” He smiled, deprecatingly. The gun was in his hand, gesturing at Blake as he talked.

Familiar with the sensation of the wrong end of a gun, Blake didn’t pause in his darning, inert and unimpressed. “You’re playing a lot of games tonight, Avon.”

“I’ve never seen you grovel. It’s common knowledge they’ve had you grovelling in the past, though, once. That must double the tension, make it all the more difficult.”

“Difficult?

“Not to cave in a second time. And a third.”

Blake snorted. “It’s true you feel a bit of a fraud at times. And too worldly-wise to ever enjoy it again, it becomes an unromantic death tussle with an enemy you know far too intimately. Maybe, once broken, you have a brittle look, but -- no, it’s like passing through a forge, it steels you. Which isn’t something to be proud of.”

Crossing to crouch near him, Avon feinted with the gun, playfully, below his ribcage. Blake’s nipples tightened, but he stayed passive, as if to prove a point. “Don’t tell me you’re going to let me get away with this?” Avon cocked his head.

“It must be therapeutic for you, after two years of impotent hate for me. You’re welcome, if fantasizing of shooting me aids your emotional health.” Blake glanced up, looking almost mischievously amused. “Why, how did you want me to react?”

Avon thought: so this is how you’re going to go, with an unruly smile and a triumphant masochism in your eyes -- the victim’s last recourse, which will let you pretend you were looking to be shot anyway, the last joke’s on them, they haven’t really hurt you, it’s you who chose to have your guts fried and that gives the end a certain dignity. Avon would have liked to slap the masochism out of his face. “Well now,” he said, “snapping my wrist would be a promising sign of your emotional health.”

Blake’s eyes changed at the contact with his own. At last he became sensible to the perversion, the feyness of allowing friends to point guns at him without hardly even noticing the difference.

“You know one mortal rebel can’t collide with a legend like Star One and come out of it whole. Believe me, Blake, I’d just as soon do the thing myself now as be a helpless witness to it in a few weeks...”

“Take the ghastly thing away,” Blake spat vehemently, and batted at it with one arm. The gun fell. Avon crouched a foot away, nothing between them.

“You’re going to realize too late,” the technician said, “that nothing’s worth dying for.”

“I don’t want to die for anything,” said Blake as though Avon were mad to suggest it. “At times I wonder if getting killed wouldn’t be the easiest thing I’ve had to do for the rebellion but I can’t even take the prospect of it, Avon --”

In Blake’s lap, the thumb he’d stabbed with the needle was bleeding. Noticing, Avon grabbed it. “Well, if you can’t take care of yourself, you ought to get somebody else to.” Blake had handsome hands; the thumb was elegantly made, patterned with ingrained dirt. It was ridiculous, and touching, Blake bleeding indifferently there before him, and in a protective mood Avon jerked the thumb to his mouth. With a quick tongue he licked away the red that had collected about the nail.

Blake tensed a notch or two further, eyes wide and amazed.

“You ought to have more pride. You prostitute this,” Avon waggled the hand, “getting shot up for your revolution. Your blood is your own, not the Federation’s or the rebels’, isn’t it?”

The blood was more sour than sweet, not to mention the grime, but the way Blake went vulnerable and cagey struck Avon. His knuckles were square and warm, but the palm damp and cold, quivering when he burrowed a thumb there. It made Avon wonder how his sweat tasted, and where the places were that his solidity gave way – where he was liquid or soft.

“Don’t.” Blake snatched his hand back, and dropped his gaze to the neat dark hair where Avon’s shirt opened. “I wish Jenna were here.”

Avon knew of the gentleness tough Jenna gave Blake when he needed it. Once he’d seen her hug him in her wiry worldly pirate’s arms – he’d seemed to appreciate it. Though Blake was trembling, Avon didn’t have the first idea of how to go about hugging him; and the softness of his mouth had already made Blake touchy. So he rose to leave.

Twisting, Blake scolded Avon’s boots, all he deigned or dared to look at. Wiping his thumb on his trousers. “Where are you off to now? It is god-awful three o’clock in the god-awful morning.”

“Then go to sleep, Roj, if you can. My life’s too short to waste time sleeping.”

#

Blake was skirting Avon on the morning of their departure for Chingis, but he wandered over to inquire of Vila whether his broken fingers were mended yet. Though his rebel career was itself a howled protest against Federation bullying, Blake tended to tolerate Avon’s bullyings with absent-minded amusement – as though it were natural in Avon.

“What’s with the unwonted interest in my sufferings?” Obediently the thief wriggled his fingers in front of Blake’s nose. Curious, Blake humphed at them. “Admiring the Marquis de Sade’s handiwork? This city we’re off to – it sounds my kind of place. Do we get any leisure time in between mowing down the populace?”

“You’ll get your holiday. But not in Chingis.” Blake was in a jovial mood, despite his better judgement. “Somewhere safe. Which means at least fifteen light years from civilized space, uninhabited and, just in case, preferably uninhabitable.”

Vila narrowed his eyes. “Avon told me you didn’t have a sense of humour.”

“Did Avon? Tell him from me I’d never have come this far without, at least, a massive sense of irony.”

“Blake, the charms of unspoilt wilderness might suit your mentality, but I like my wilderness to be as spoilt as possible, positively corrupt, it makes me feel at home. And I’m not talking to Avon.”

Left alone, Vila sucked his fingers and sniffed dejectedly.

#

Perhaps Kuvvetli’s mouth is unkind, Blake thought, because of the gruelling life he leads. It was a difficult thing, having a mission. And no one could deny that Kuvvetli, like most veteran rebels of Blake’s acquaintance, had to be crueller to himself than he was to anyone else. Avon would say kindness begins at home -- that if you’re not a little soft with yourself, you’ll tend to be flinty and unyielding with the rest of the galaxy. That denying yourself to help others is counter-productive. Blake hoped his own sorrows hadn’t made him unkind.

Kuvvetli smoked the ever-present pipe, his one addiction, listening to his brother Mustakim. How can you see good and not love it at once and completely – once you see it how can you champion anything else? Blake was infatuated with the thing he interpreted as Kuvvetli’s goodness. Kuvvetli wasn’t an innocent, he was ignorant of nothing. But his intelligence didn’t dirty him – it wasn’t random and liable to tread any path like Avon’s, who saw morality as a crude restraining device not meant for his genius. Kuvvetli was something different. Not easier to take, but worth Blake’s dedication in the way the words he believed in were -- words like freedom, which distilled all his longings and troubled thought.

Kissing his brother, Mustakim left. Despite Mustakim’s bad, stinking tooth they kissed mouth to mouth. The priest kissed anybody, though not Blake. Watching with an agreeable pang of envy, Blake sentimentalised the custom. He was a pariah because he was aware of the sensuality in Kuvvetli and couldn’t have ignored it were the priest to kiss him. Instinctively he understood the needed physical comfort Kuvvetli derived from this traditional touching. That would make them both awkward. So Kuvvetli, who saw everything, only held his hand.

A figure scudded towards them over the sand. Vila, who had gone scouting with Cally. Synchronization lost somewhere along the way he fell to a knee a few metres short. Up again, he collared Avon. “Cally,” the thief managed.

“Sorry – second guess.”

“Ran into a Huda pit.”

The name Huda pit spooked the Kisiris -- the supernatural fissures in the earth which changed ill-fated goatherds to roaming lunatics, tormented by a sight they could tell to no one. Hediye jumped up, distressed. “Where did you leave her?” snapped Blake.

“Miles, it must be miles away. There was this cave. She just kept yelling in my mind, in Auronar.” Vila licked his lips repeatedly, frantic. He clung to Avon, shoulders hunched in to ease the labouring of his chest, which frightened him.

“What now, what can we do?” Impatiently Blake looked from the priest to Avon, for an urgency forthcoming from neither.

Vila snuffled, “Her voice went all funny in my head,” ending on a presaging gurgle.

“Get a grip on yourself,” said Avon, then did it for him. Longing for the security of being ordered about, Vila let Avon sit him down. He quietened, emotions held together by the brusque hand on his arm. “Is that it, then?” Blake demanded. “The mental disturbance, is it always permanent?” The priest took a moment to answer, so that Blake prompted, importunate, “Kuvvetli?”

“If you like, Roj, I can help her brain combat the drug. But I would also have to induce amnesia in Cally. You see, she must lose the experience of the pit. I can only work with the pictures of memory, inducing dreams of recent happenings and then inhibiting the mind from looking at them again.”

“If there’s a chance, let’s do it.”

Avon said, “Blake, you’d be mad to let him and his psychic witch-doctory loose on Cally. Either the brain is damaged by this mysterious substance or it is not. Either she’s flipped her lid or she hasn’t -- and there’s nothing we can do here. We don’t even know what causes the dysfunction.”

“I know,” said Kuvvetli quietly. “It’s a drug, a hallucinogenic gas. I descended into a Huda pit myself once, as the ancient seers did.”

One or two of the Kisiris swivelled in amazement. Avon said, “Tell us what happens.”

“Though Huda means god, the hallucinogenic initiates a... self-revelation. It’s like hitching a ride on a whirlwind to the depths of the mind. You need preparation.”

“You mean looking at the dregs of yourself drives you mad?” asked Avon.

Kuvvetli smiled. “It’s not so crude as that.”

“What then? What in yourself could possibly make you mad?”

Leisurely, the priest pondered his answer. But Blake was furious at the delay. Too smitten to pounce on Kuvvetli, he pounced on Avon. “Cally is hurt, she needs help now -- would you take your scientific curiosity someplace private and shove it?”

The spectre of insanity hung over the gathering. Blake, with his abused mind, was afraid that any more abuse would put him in a Federation asylum. But Avon was sure he was capable of driving himself to derangement, no help needed from the enemy. There was a world of difference. Holding Vila’s arm Avon looked up, reluctantly. The episode began to resemble a dream in which people kept getting side-tracked. Blake was being drawn into it now. Avon was pursuing some weird fundamental question, Blake couldn’t fathom what; perhaps it had little to do with the discussion. But there was tragedy implied in the question, or the answer, or the eyes. The man’s eyes, underlain with blue, held a kind of desperation more beautiful than ever goodness was. And his voice was mellifluous and a crease gashed the beautiful brow. “But I want to know.”

Blake squeezed his thumbs to his temples. “Can you do it on the spot, Kuvvetli? Vila, take us to her. You. Get off your rear end.”

“I wouldn’t like to cramp your style,” answered Avon. “You run along and play hero.”

Despite his professed hurry Blake came a step nearer. “So it’s that simple after all, Avon? You don’t care a jot.”

Avon sighed and wondered why Blake liked to see him as a cold-minded swine. More victim mentality, he supposed; perhaps Blake missed the Federation thugs who’d been so much a part of his years on Earth since the Freedom Party. Resident substitute, that was what Avon was. “As long,” he said, “as you don’t go caring too much if you can’t help her.”

“Forget him,” Blake snapped. It was a vain hope. Veering away he carried with him a picture of Avon’s lips. They were silk, and netted with fine lines, and talking genuinely. And he couldn’t help wanting to listen to the dark things they said.

#

Avon watched the rescue party traipse back into camp, the Kisiri mystic like a messiah, Cally like a half-modified mutoid, Blake like a witness to butchery. He learnt from Hediye that her erstwhile husband had induced partial amnesia in Cally and predicted she would be fine. Auron minds were more pliant, and more tenacious, than the Kisiris”.

Apparently what Kuvvetli had done merited a celebration. The Kisiris uncorked spirits. Shying from the rowdiness Blake brewed fruit tea for Cally, and persuaded her to huddle in his arm to drink it. He had returned appalled, nearly as shaken as she, and neither said much. To Blake she looked as badly off after Kuvvetli”s cure as before, when he had burnt herbs under her nose to dampen the effects of the hallucinogenic. She had been too strong for just Blake to hold then.

When her diaphragm began trembling he murmured to her, using bodily contact as an anchor. “It’s okay. I”ve been through this kind of thing myself. It’s all so frail and nebulous, isn’t it? So easily lost. You can depend on nothing if you can’t depend on your own mind. Just hang on and ride out the shock. You’ll begin to trust your thoughts again and then there won’t be such a vacuum. I’ve been through it, you piece what’s left together.”

Soon he saw her to bed. Lingering there as she clung to his fingers in sleep, he braced himself to face the brief extroversion of asking someone for a bottle. From experience, he knew he couldn’t ward off these fits. From time to time it would swamp him and the only thing to do was go off quietly alone and see himself through with whatever methods it took. Retrieving a camouflaged packet from the depths of his satchel he went outside.

Even Vila would look askance at him were this known about. But as mulishly as he always wanted things he wanted nothingness. To inflict the only thing he feared, let it riddle him. He wanted to know nothingness inside out by the end of the night, have it know him inside out. The only thing with which he could fill his empty, mutilated skull.

“You don’t need that -- you see the world through rose-coloured glasses as it is.”

Avon, of course. “For god’s sake.”

“I saw you slink unobtrusively off into the bushes with the bottle. You haven’t even the precaution of a gun.”

Blake was sitting in a wild garden of herbs and bizarre stone pillars sculpted by the wind, bringing to mind goblins and rock trolls. “Sometimes you can be shallow, Avon — it was a precaution not to bring a gun. I might use it in disgust. The moment I deserve it, you know, don’t think I’ll hesitate.”

“Blake -- are you inebriated, by any chance?”

“Quite.”

Avon stared in comic wonder. “Why in space are you inebriated?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Wouldn’t I?” he completed the quote.

“I doubt it. Believe me, I don’t particularly like doing this but I need to.”

“Well, I need to talk to you.”

“It isn’t mutual,” Blake said.

He used sufficient embellishment to make Avon observe, “That stuff obviously spoils your temper. Where are you weaving to?”

Blake was trying to evade him. “Solitude, don’t you understand, I cant take company.” But the hand persuading him back was twitchingly insistent.

“At least explain yourself before you disappear. I’m curious to know what you’re doing.”

“I’m non-existing, not here, I’m a haphazard mote of space dust, I’m chewing down my fingers to the knuckles and spitting them out.”

Avon said, “I see.”

“Told you it was beyond you. So go poke your nose into a black hole instead of me. And would you stop limping, whether you hate to admit it or not your ankle”s as good as mine.”

“Watching you abuse yourself sounds more instructive than watching Vila seduce Hediye. Though try as you might you’re too vain; if you want to be abused, I’d do a more efficient job.”

“I’m well-practised, thanks.”

“Learn to delegate, Blake, I’m here to help. I could tell you all the nasty things you are, it would be easier on you than having to say it yourself, and I’d enjoy it too.”

“Avon.” He corrugated his brow forbiddingly. “Just because I’m saturated, it doesn’t mean you are free to behave as though you are.”

“I think it does.”

“Are you going to leave me alone?”

“I always found that difficult.”

“If I fall to my knees and beg, would it help?”

“I’d dearly like you to try it.”

“Not on your life.” But he did, more or less, since his balance was askew anyway. “Get lost and leave me in peace,” he commanded from the ground, waspish, hands propped on his thighs.

Avon’s mouth went crooked. “That was a mistake; I’m far too fascinated now.”

“What you don’t know, Avon, is that it signifies nothing, because in my time I’ve done as much fighting on my knees and on my belly as on the dignity of my feet.”

Avon knelt too. “You needn’t run away from me, I think I like you saturated. Won’t you let me watch? After all, I did undertake to complete my dissection and classification of you within a week down here.”

Emotions bleached, Blake gave up and suffered him. He sat with an arm twisted round his neck, drink on an upraised knee, never taking his mouth from the rim. Apparently he didn’t plan on speaking, so Avon absorbed the puckered flesh between his brows, the small rapid sips he took, in silence. But after a while he said, “May I inquire what you’re thinking about?”

“You’ve been told. Nothingness and gnawed-off fingers.”

“Interesting?”

“Fascinating, I’m afraid.”

“It must be messy. The fingers.”

“By the time you’re past the second joint, they do get quite gory.”

“What do they taste like?”

“Well, the bones splinter after a few decent crunches, and the flesh is just kind of rubbery, like octopus tentacles.”

“You know, I have sharp teeth.” Avon demonstrated with a smile. “Wouldn’t you like help eating them?”

“Leave my fingers alone.”

“Is that the reward I’d get, if I became your left hand and took on your dirty work for you?”

“Look, I’m making this conversation as nonsensical as possible in the hope you’ll give up on it.”

“I’m used to it. Why did you choose drink? Do you only dare indulge those foibles not quite comforting enough to hook you on life?”

“It’s a crude answer but it works. Fills up my head until it feels solid again. Just once or twice a year, it puts me back on the rails.”

“At present it’s pushing you rapidly off them. Give me a sip.”

“Get your own,” Blake protested as he confiscated the glass.

“I want to taste yours, not my own.”

“It tastes the blessed same.”

“But it’s conceptually different. You know, I used to copy Anna, wear her shirts — my ambition was to be more Anna than I was myself. Since I liked her far more than me.”

“You’re mad.”

“You’d know.”

This may be an even worse mistake, Blake thought, but he decided not to prevent it. Avon sipped. And spat it out.

Blake’s eyes scuttled away. Dedicatedly, Avon swallowed a careful sample and handed it back. He was obliged to wrap the uncooperative fingers around the glass.

“That,” he remarked, in case Blake were unaware, “is slugged full of kynalin.” Blake sloshed it around, unable to argue with this fact but not quite liking to agree. “Kynalin, Blake.”

“I heard you the first time.”

“What’s so unbearable that you have to poison yourself?”

“Nothing. I know better than you what’s good for me.”

“Are you addicted?”

“No I am not. Have a little faith in my judgement.”

“So it keeps your head together in the short term, but how about after?”

“There isn’t an after for me. I don’t have to take afters into account.”

“I like following your foibles, but with that particular one I’ll stay strictly vicarious. I intend to have my faculties next year. Are you going to tell me why you take it?”

“Figure it out.”

“Ah, you want me to figure you out now? So I’ve been sitting here watching you calmly self-destruct.”

“Offends your survival sense, does it?”

“Blake, you didn’t have to take the last words of that dead friend of yours so literally, you know.”

Blake clamped his mouth.

“If you like I can provide a graphic commentary on how it’s corroding your various insides, would that gratify you?”

“Delighted at my hypocrisy, aren’t you? Tell me I’m a hypocrite.”

“In your frame of mind you’d enjoy the insult. No, you’re welcome to dissemble with them, I’ll even help you.”

“Who’s them?”

“Them is everybody. Them is always everybody, Blake. But there’s no need to dissemble with me — your faults and failings are the only part of you I like.”

“No wonder you like me so little.” Blake gave a silly charming grin, too wide. “Shall I tell you what I used to do? It’ll shock you.”

“Only unrealists are ever shocked.”

“I used to cry instead of drink. Are you shocked? After the treatment it became something of a habit — it’s difficult to exert any restraint when your head’s been drained. Leaves the nerves permanently jangled.”

“How do you mean, cry?” Avon tried to echo Blake’s smile.

“Come now, you must at least have heard of it.”

“Hysterically or silently?”

“However it came. The point is — you won’t have found this out, Avon -- it doesn’t change things one jot.”

“Crying?”

“Precisely. You can writhe about on the floor all you please and get up just as strong. That’s the worst discovery, that you’re only ever pretending to disintegrate. So I can drink myself giddy and tell you all manner of things, knowing in the morning it won’t make a blind bit of difference. Depressing thought.”

“It might make a difference to me, Blake.”

“Then you delude yourself.” Blake rubbed at his jaw. It was pointless feeling immoral with Avon, but he was a unique case. Nothing was a crime in Avon’s eyes, therefore Avon of all the galaxy wouldn’t blame him for anything. Avon was freedom. Avon didn’t believe in guilt; already Blake was mentally whipping himself for dragging Cally to Kisir Kadin. His other shipmates, though -- “Jenna might understand, do you think?” he asked, anxious and just a little plaintive. “If I explained how it’s the simplest thing to do in the circumstances.”

“Jenny would be miffed.”

“Miffed? That you knew?”

"That you were getting your kicks from a little packet instead of with her.” He hung on Blake’s reaction. Blake screwed his face up, which could mean anything. “You look as far gone as Cally. Shall I cuddle you as you drink like you were doing with her?”

“Cally’s in a bad state. Where’s your sympathy?”

The technician decided to lay an arm about his shoulders anyway, as he liked to do when Blake reminded him of a child. It was always interesting, touching Blake. Avon had a physical reaction to him, antipathetic to begin with, but after that subsided the same chemistry made him reluctant to draw away again.

Blake appeared not to notice the arm but said, “I’m much further gone than Cally.”

“Now I know why you’re skulking far from camp. Afraid your monk will discover you’re a clandestine drug addict.”

“Kuvvetli would understand,” Blake said rather lamely.

“Only too well, since he has a skeleton or two in his own cupboard. But he keeps his sternly locked away and would still damn you for not doing likewise. Kuvvetli isn’t worth your time.”

“While you’re gracious enough not to damn me?”

“I may have a few worse qualities, Roj, but I’m too impatient to bother with hypocrisy.”

“No-one calls me Roj unless they mean it. Come to that, no-one calls me Roj.”

“Then you can’t afford to quibble about whether or not I mean it. Tell me, why have you deserted us for Kuvvetli?”

“There’s a goodness in him.” Remembering Cally’s face go empty under the priest’s hands, Blake frowned. “I feel more comfortable with you. But that’s by the by. His face...”

“Is very fetching.”

“Maybe. Tremendously beautiful, actually, but because of what it means. Those rich colours of his eyes and skin, but blending to something stark and maybe forbidding, without compromise, and if you can’t like it it’s your own failing.” Touchily he added, hoping he hadn’t been eulogising, “Faces only interest me if they mean something.”

“Does mine mean anything?”

“I suspect it does. Something rank and a lot less savoury.”

“Ah,” said Avon, amused.

“Sorry. I lie much more adeptly when I’m sober.”

“What you define as goodness is a complete mystery to me. But I do know his becoming a monk was nothing more elevated than running away. I don’t like to see him conning you.”

Blake had suffered enough snide remarks about Kuvvetli to know what was coming. But tonight he hadn’t the heart to slink away from the topic. With alcohol his mind tended to slip into certain well-worn grooves. And if in discussing Kuvvetli he gave himself away — hadn’t he opened up to Avon thus far without dire consequences? Compromising by straying not completely from the, point he said, “Hediye’s defences seem to be rapidly crumbling.”

“Yes, Vila has quite an armoury of winning ways. If you don’t keep an eye on him he’ll wheedle you into anything, by charm or uncharm, whichever you’ll fall for. Hediye’s pleased enough to be appreciated at last.”

“Kuvvetli appreciates her. Loves her, no less. They’re great friends. As for their bonding, Kuvvetli regrets that it wasn’t to be.”

Avon considered him, not moving the casual, comfortable arm. “There’s no way you can be that naive, Blake.” A knee lodged emphatically against him.

“If you say so.” Since Avon was going to put it there, he balanced his drink on the knee.

“You’ve done more time in prison than any of us. Everyone gets tattooed in prison.”

“Now you’re deliberately confusing me.” He elbowed Avon with a bland smile. “What have tattoos to do with Kuvvetli?”

“Nothing in the world. I was re-making a joke which apparently wasn’t one.”

“Well, if we’re back on the original topic I wish you’d tell me what it is.”

“I merely meant,” Avon said, having definite doubts now, “that your precious monk is nothing more than a repressed queer.”

Blake failed to stifle the reaction after all. The technician patiently allowed him a fit of incoherent mirth. But Blake said, “How do you mean, queer?”

Avon’s gaze went as blank as Blake’s — only Avon’s was genuine. “Queer, Blake. You must at least have heard of it.”

“Do you mean,” Blake helped him by elaborating, “that he’s queer as in slightly peculiar, or queer as in the misnomer for men who love their fellow man with all literalness?”

“Neither; I meant he’s a faggot.”

“Ah.” Blake squinted sagely at the sky. “One of those.” He tried to confess with his eyes, but found eyes are not as loquacious as poetry would have it — Avon merely lifted an eyebrow at him. “You needn’t sound as though that would make him a charlatan.”

“So you did realise?”

“What do you think I am, thick?”

“Yet you continue to hang around him like a forlorn decima?”

“I knew that detail a long time before you did. But I’ve as yet failed to see the relevance you apparently attach to it. Every society has its cruel phobias about different things. Kuvvetli’s -- like, predictably, contemporary Federation Earth -- happens to have a phobia about inter-gender love. Federation legalese calls it moral deviancy, this barbarian planet doesn’t even dignify it with a name.”

“Whereas the liberal utopia you plan to impose on us all will embrace perverts too?”

“I gather the idea of embracing perverts doesn’t appeal much to you.”

“It’s embarrassing, Blake, the way you champion absolutely anything that’s unfashionable. The religious minority was distasteful enough. But please don’t tell me not to knock what I haven’t tried again.”

“Well, if that’s the way you think,” Blake knitted his brow. “If that’s the way you think, Avon --”

“Let’s assume as a working hypothesis that’s the way I think.”

“I must admit, I was counting on something more intelligent than blind prejudice from you.”

“Maybe,” he suggested with an impudent air, “it isn’t blind.”

Wondering just what that meant, Blake set his jaw, feeling stabbed in the back by this man who nevertheless kept up the presumptuous clasp and the conversational tone. “You were born to a family as aristocratic as Servalan’s, weren’t you, weaned on truffles and tripe and I don’t mean the eating kind. A winner all the way and you sniff your lordly nose at anyone beneath you.” He snatched back his glass.

“I can afford to,” observed Avon with faultless logic.

“You’re a fascist, but don’t think you’re being elite. I thought you scorned running with the herd.”

“Naturally, if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s cliches.”

“I hate to break the news, but you are one.”

“Now being sexually normal is a cliche, is it? Well,” he mused to himself, “I can’t have that. I’ll have to cultivate outlandish tastes at once.”

“What with your narrow channelling and stereotypic thinking, you’ve disillusioned me about brains. What you have is mere route logic and a library of pre-recorded data.”

“All this because your monk happens to make me sick?” Avon had switched on his habitual enigmatic stare. Which Blake might have recognised as more a retreat than an attack, were he not on the defensive himself. Though he rarely did more than a slapdash job of deciphering Avon.

“Since you have a puerile interest in the subject,” said Blake, “you may as well tell me from where you leapt to this conclusion.”

“That he’s a faggot? He acts like one. And, before you say it takes one to know one, I must point out the semantic consequences in view of your claim that you knew about it first.”

Blake didn’t care anymore for consequences. “That is the very last thing I would deign to say to you. Seeing what an opinionated chauvinistic macho conformist you are it takes on the air of a compliment to intimate your anthropomorphic circuitry could be subtilized by such an experience.” He was drunk enough to add what he fondly imagined to be his worst put-down –”I hate you.”

Being told all this from a distance of six inches didn’t abash Avon in the least. “Do forgive me. I wasn’t aware I was straying onto such painfully touchy ground.” 

Lowering his head like a goaded bull Blake continued, “Nor do I wish to hear your gutter terminology. Kuvvetli is what he chooses to call himself and you’ve no business calling him anything different. May I make a suggestion to you?”

“If it won’t blister my aristocratic ears.”

“Why don’t you just swap sides and denounce your comrades like they had me doing; it will be quicker and easier on all of us. Earth is obviously where you belong. Among your Alpha peers -- imperious, insensitive, never looking past homogeneity...”

“Better homogeneity than the filth of homosexuality.” Sometimes Avon would make a terse statement, and by leavening his voice at the end give it the ring of a question. His eyebrows would lift, expectant, though the words themselves apparently suffered no reply.

Blake’s hazel eyes had grown light. “Avon, I owe you an apology. You’re right, after all.”

“I am?”

“Right in that I am ludicrously optimistic in estimating human nature. With luck, this time I’ll learn.”

“Why so hostile? We’ve disagreed on points of dogma before.”

Blake was torpid, as though with shock or anguish. “But don’t you know what you’re saying?”

Now a twitch possessed the corner of Avon’s mouth. Again his voice had that mellow musical quality as he said, “I didn’t mean to insult you, Roj.”

Sincerity and satire blended in his manner. The eyes were far too close to joust with. Quietly Blake said, “Your opinion is your own -- I won’t be inflicted with it. Take your arm away.”

“Why – you find it uncomfortable?”

“Take it away.”

“Maybe I was just beginning to like it there.”

“If you don’t want to embrace a pervert, take it away.”

Avon pursed his lips. “If you put it like that.” He removed the offending limb.

“Thank you. Now get up and go.”

“You’re such a child.”

“For the remainder of this mission, if you have nothing official to impart to me, you may keep your mouth decidedly shut.”

“Since you’re the one in a huff, why don’t you storm off?”

Blake thought about this. “It would be simpler if you left.”

“Simpler for you.”

“Precisely.”

“Because you’re plastered.”

“Precisely.”

“The trouble is, you’re so unflaggingly ridiculous that I can’t bear to take my eyes off you for fear of missing the entertainment. But if it would help, Blake, I’ll lend you my arm again so you can rise with some semblance of decorum.”

“I do like gentlemen.”

“I don’t doubt it. And if your walk’s too wobbly, you’re welcome to use me as a crutch. I owe you that. See, I believe in dignity between friends no more than decency, but I expect you gathered that five days ago.”

Continuing to stare him down, Blake pictured that last time Avon had been so near. Lame, tired, sullen and urinating, watching him with the same sleek fine face and the same expression of playful guile. A smile pulled at one corner of Blake’s mouth — he quashed it. The other comer went, but Blake caught it too and said, “You don’t seem to be taking this conversation with the gravity it deserves.”

“It’s a chronic problem I have with you.”

“Avon, you’re diabolical.” He couldn’t keep his moods constant and when the smile came it was floppy and senseless. “I don’t believe for a minute you’re homophobic.”

“You’ve just done so for at least eight minutes.”

“Do you ever mean a word you utter?”

“Obviously it would be a useless exercise answering that, since you wouldn’t believe I meant it. Let me get another drink down you. Where’s your poison?”

“Back pocket.”

“At this juncture I’m not about to delve into your pockets.” Blake fished it out of his trousers and slapped it into Avon’s palm. “How much do you like?” Avon guessed, generously. “Here you are. Cheers. And Blake, if you’re going to wallow in misery try not to do it with that idiotic grin plastered all over your face.”

“You keep distracting me. Why do you do things like that?”

“I enjoy it. Besides, with your morbid distrust of me you wouldn’t have confessed anything except under severe provocation. So you meant what I wondered if you meant when you said this Gamma friend was everything to you?”

“Find it funny, don’t you?”

“I find it the most hilarious news I’ve heard in months,” he said deadpan. “I should have guessed. If anyone is going to burden themselves with a thing like that it would have to be you.”

“It wasn’t a decision I made, you know. It came with the plumbing.”

“So what’s it like?”

“What’s what like?” Blake asked suspiciously.

“Being bent.”

“I’ve forgotten; they set my memories straight. In any case, I’ve given it up. For your edification I’m not bent – I’m nothing.”

“Ah. Does that mean you don’t have illicit longings for Kuvvetli?”

“I have nothing of the kind. I feel damn sorry for the situation he’s in. But, beautiful though he is, I’m not masochistic enough to fall for celibate religious prophets.”

“Wise. He’d never give you a thing.”

At mention of the priest Blake’s mood changed again. “You think you’re tough, Avon, but there’s less human comfort in Kuvvetli. You didn’t see the way he healed Cally. He shattered her with a touch. She went like smashed glass. I don’t know if I forgive him. The Federation needn’t have used brainbutchers on me, Kuvvetli could have done the job.”

“I warned you. So why get upset that I detest the creature? Shall I tell you a story?”

“A story? I’d like that. About you, perhaps?”

“Perhaps. But concentrate, you won’t hear it again. Maybe I can even give you a passably happy ending. That depends on you.”

“I’m hungry for happy endings.”

“If you so choose there’ll be one. The story begins with Fyfe.”

“White hair,” Blake remembered.

“White, yes. Thick, impenetrable white, always, in any light. With a kink in it like fleece. Only he was nonchalant and wore it cropped close to his skull. He hardly deserved it, anyway. Doubtless you would have pardoned his hair because of its beauty. But I resented it -- I told you why. We never wasted much time with each other. Ten years ago we had a fight -- I mean, a worse than usual fight. And he began hitting me. After that I left, I haven’t kept track of where he is.”

“If you cared to forgive him... Orac might be able to find him for you.”

“Forgiving people isn’t my forte, but I can do it if I’m likely to get anymore acceptance than before. I used to be neurotic he’d stop liking me. After the first verbal brawl I considered killing myself -- that will amaze you. The main purpose of the exercise was to be to shake him. He was three years older, off training half the time and when he was away no one else mattered. I learnt how to win attention, which I wasn’t naturally good at — from being mute I became loud enough for word of me to reach him. Fyfe had to notice, Fyfe had to approve. I stole things he wanted, then became dangerous when he discovered my methods and refused to take them. I engineered fracases, was obnoxious to all and sundry and worst of all to him. Fyfe always knew what I was about, he understood me so let me get away with horrendous insults to himself. The funny thing was, when he came home from training, I soon went uncaring. I never comprehended socialising and was at a loss. The point vanished, I went mute again. Clumsy when I actually had what I wanted after displaying such art in getting it. Anna never met him.”

“You and your Anna.” Blake smiled, sentimentally.

“She was a saint. Not that anyone else knew it. Without conscience and by the end quite amoral, they drove her to that. Saintly nevertheless.”

“I wish she were alive for you.”

“She used to ask me, why don’t I ever know what you’re thinking? I told her I could never say it. She said, not even to me? Well, Anna was the last person. With Anna I didn’t confide a thing -- that, I was convinced, was the only way to keep her.” He paused. “I’m wagering I don’t have to repeat that conversation with you, Blake, who aren’t quite so saintly. I’ve not slept with anyone since Anna, I’ve nearly forgotten it can be done with other people.”

Blake said, “Your record must beat mine.”

“You needn’t make it sound like a circus feat. If Anna’s death was unavoidable, I would have liked to see to it myself. I have it pictured. Simply, with a knife. A knife is intimate — don’t you think? Perhaps three stabs, holding her eyes the while, which were luminescent like the stained glass in those forbidden musty cathedrals.” At Blake’s comic face he explained, “It’s only jealousy -- I didn’t want anyone else to touch her. You’ve more violence in you than I have, though you’re celibate there too. Who was it said he refrained from killing Travis because he would have enjoyed it?”

“Granted, but I don’t recall I was in love with Travis at the time.”

Avon shrugged. “These two years since the London I’ve been working on the ending to Anna’s part of the story. Are you curious why I never responded to your sorry attempts to be sociable during meals, boring watches, walking by chance down the same corridor? You so longed to be talked to, sad as a puppy whimpering to be patted. I might have taken pity but I had a prior commitment. My time was given to thinking up ways of avenging Anna. At any price.”

“Price of suicide, likely.”

“Likely. Anna’s torturer is notorious, name of Shrinker. My favoured method, one that charms me more the longer I think of it, is surrender. Poetic justice for both him and me. For once I want there to be poetry in the thing. The hands that tortured her torturing me, only I shall smash them, those last hands to touch her. Probably they’ll be the last hands to touch me, too -- I haven’t worked out an escape plan yet. Mine will certainly be his last. But I have to earn him. He’s worth more than nearly anything to me and I might have to pay nearly everything beforehand. Shrinker cracks only the most stubborn of nuts. There will be a hierarchy of interrogators to get through before they let me have him.”

Blake said nothing, grave but placid. Interrogators were a devil he knew. The fact he didn’t make a fuss appealed to Avon.

“One thing,” Avon continued, “I was hesitant to say to either of them, is that I was committed to Fyfe, to Anna, completely, down to the dregs. That’s reality, that’s what you for all your caring are too decent to give. So don’t call me selfish too often -- will you? As for you, Blake, I see you doing all manner of weird and wonderful things to yourself. You’re pitiful to watch. Those boys you were accused of raping.”

“Merciful stars.” The tendons rose on the backs of his hands.

“I gather some official had a sense of humour. Or they knew those charges could be substantiated further if there was any query raised.”

“There’s nothing I’ve ever wanted to do less in my life.”

“I wasn’t doubting it, Roj. You needn’t say much. But at least give me their names.”

“Payter Fen. Carl Deca. Renor Leesal,” he listed, wearily but almost reverential. “I never actually saw the children. My sister had children, I never did, but hers I adored.”

Resisting the instinct to settle an arm back around him, Avon said, “Child molesting, that’s the pits, isn’t it? But it’s good to have their names. A symbol for everyone’s uncommitted crimes.”

“When you’ve finished wallowing in the mud they sling at me.”

“I just want to hear you talk about it. You no longer need be afraid of telling me things. Where’s your Kuvvetli now? Anywhere but here getting vicariously stoned with you.”

“I never asked for company.”

“On certain conditions I’ll accept your differences.”

“I never wanted your acceptance.”

After a beat Avon said, “Maybe I want yours, Blake. And if I gloat at knowing your vulnerabilities, I am sufficiently fair to offer you mine.”

“Now I see your philosophy: let’s sink down into the slime, where we can be anarchic and intimate.”

He smiled. “Reality must lay in the foundations of a thing, and I mean to get to the bottom of you as well as me.”

Blake’s attention was wandering. “Does it seem strange to you, the way I loved Stev?”

“Did you?” Avon asked idly. “How do you know?”

“How do you mean, how do I know?” Uncertain, he frowned at Avon with those luminous eyes, coloured like bruises.

“You said you’ve half invented him for lack of facts. Your only lucid memory is his -- euthanasia. The memory plays tricks on itself in order to survive, it’s a master at wishful thinking. After being vivisected your mind was desperate to heal itself. This man could be some comparative stranger, or minor friend, it latched onto to restore your emotional security.”

In his current condition Blake seemed to take the speculation as indisputable truth. He hugged himself tightly, fingers working. “He was the one man I loved, did you know? Stev. He never existed after all.” Incongruously he chuckled, and sung, “That’s the way it goes.”

“What does it matter?” Avon suggested further. “You need Stev no more than you need Kuvvetli.”

“While you can be secure in the knowledge that Anna Grant existed. Tell me what you’d do, Avon, if you learnt she never had?”

“You’re getting morbid and I haven’t finished my story yet. Shall I go on? This part concerns you.” Blake had abandoned the half empty glass, gazing into ripples of amber sand about his boots. “Your preoccupation,” Avon told him, “is to tear down evil. To trample on it in an orgy of destruction and talk as though it’s creation. You’re a paradox, Blake. The average Terra Nostran would blanch at things that you’re willing to undertake for the sake of bringing goodness to the galaxy. You have a lust for innocence, for the world to be innocent -- no wonder, with all that corrupted innocence in you. I don’t mind any of that. I’m willing to compromise. It’s a tradition, I hear, that villains fall helplessly for that rare breed, the honest, if by chance they meet. Look at you and Kuvvetli. Next to you he”s comparatively pure. You’re so hopelessly out of place beside him I wince to see it. Next to me, though, you’re comparatively pure. And I fear I’m beginning to like it. Which, you will appreciate, is awkward. Though naturally I’ve no sense of unbridgeable inferiority to you, such as you seem to suffer from with Kuvvetli. Or else I wouldn’t have risked talking to you, as I didn’t with Anna, would I?”

Blake was trying conscientiously to listen, but by now he was silly with kynalin and drink. The word Stev kept circulating in his head, its meaning bled away with too much repetition -- he couldn’t take the word. Unfelt tension, unexpected yearning welled up in him in waves like sobs. Straining his arms around his legs and face he sat there holding himself in.

“Well, what’s wrong with you?” Avon asked in mild bemusement. “Why did you have to do this to yourself?” It slipped his mind he had helped.

“So I won’t be capable of mashing your face to an ugliness in the ground.”

“Do you want to? What precisely have you got against my face?” Blake didn’t answer, a tight untouchable ball. “Are you crying by any chance?”

“Incapable these days.”

“What a shame, I was looking forward to it. I trust you’re pleased with the way your truce is going?”

“What?”

“Your truce with me,” he repeated innocently. “To keep you calm and collected – wasn’t it?”

Rolling his head, Blake looked up at Avon. Who was leaning near, hips tilted, in trousers that moulded soft and well-worn to the curves of his lap, so Blake had urges to nuzzle there and sleep. And the hair that would be silky if it had been washed lately, which Blake had a vague memory of smoothing down after his leg had been set. Or maybe he had only wanted to smooth it. There was a sweetness just below Blake’s belly, and about Avon’s mouth. He wondered if the eyelids would sink were he to nestle the wetness of their tongues together.

Blake narrowed his eyes suspiciously. He announced, “I don’t want it anymore.”

“Was it something I said, Roj?”

“Look, go away. I’ll be normal in an hour or two, or at least by dawn. I told you I’m a muddle, and I don’t mean the drug. You’re intact, you must be getting a worse impression than the case is. I’m functional generally. You can’t watch any more, it gets worse.”

With a lazy feline smile Avon said, “I’ll let you be — that’s all I was after. You can break down in peace. And I won’t tell anyone we talked if you don’t.”

“Agreed... Why?”

“It isn’t done to talk.”

“I wouldn’t know, no one has talked to me since my treatment. Why did we do it then?”

“Because I wanted to, and you knew no better.” Without another glance, Avon walked back to camp.

#

Kommissar Nav Rul was a dapper dignified little man, unsmilingly humorous, modest of dress and restrained in all his habits. His appearance was neat, his hair peppered with grey. The camera had caught him scratching the side of his nose. Blake studied newspaper clippings, killing forty-eight hours while Kuvvetli, Mustakim and Hediye were off looking for lodgings in Chingis. If anything, Kuvvetli’s departure that morning was a relief. Psyching himself up for the assassination attempt, the priest was no help.

Vila had forgiven Avon, at least long enough to cajole him into cards. Avon was in a rare mood to spoil the thief. Their game was impossible to follow, an exercise in hypocrisy, the unstated object being to cheat as brazenly as possible. When Blake asked if they never played an honest, unconvoluted hand both protested, “I am!” The thief kept up a monologue of puns, and Avon a scathing stare at various but equally unimpressive portions of Vila, to divert attention from what their fingers were getting away with. Vila wanted to reminisce about a pleasure satellite he alleged they had once visited, but his partner affected a poor memory for most of the names and certainly all the pursuits he mentioned.

“Trained yourself to hate him yet?”

“Um?” Blake asked a moment later, realising he was being addressed.

Avon repeated, “Don’t you need to learn to hate the target before you kill him?” The thief palmed a few credits.

“Not intellectually. My body, perhaps. Though I do hate his complacency.” Grimy, scarred and puzzled, Blake brooded on the urbane moustache of his victim. It was handsomely trimmed, only a trifle too natty. One article called him a reticent courteous workaholic with no family. He had volunteered for the ten year posting on Kisir Kadin and had engaged a private tutor to acquaint him with the native tongue. At public appearances he would try a few imperfect words of it, with a bad accent and followed by a self-deprecating joke.

“You can tell by his look that he believes I’m the crazy one, not him,” Blake said. “As though my interpretation of reality is far-fetched and extreme. But their society is what’s extreme, insane, and they began this cycle of killing. It’s their violence that was gratuitous, mine is only an answer to it. People are just confused by the fact that he looks like a civilised thoughtful gentleman and I look like a raving psychopath. I guess that’s how they keep the upper hand.”

Now, however, Avon was ignoring him. He accused Vila, “Been at it, haven’t you?” Just for the sake of an argument, for he had seen nothing.

“Been at which?” Vila was rarely at only one thing.

“You look too cherubic by half.”

“It’s prejudice holding my good looks against me.”

Avon dealt, quietly slipping himself an extra card or two. This time fixing his children-at-an-interplanetary-zoo goggle on the anomaly of Vila’s big toe.

Though Vila was winning, Avon didn’t mind in the least. Exquisitely amusing thoughts were whirring through the technician’s mind. Not even Meegat had left him looking this smug, Vila thought. Ever since Blake drifted into the two’s tent early that afternoon Avon, even when pretending he’d forgotten Blake was there, had that oblivious-to-all-else air he had when communing with Orac. He misses Orac, so has found a substitute plaything to explore, thought Vila. On catching the particular intentness with which Avon took in Blake flopping restless from one slouch to another he thought further, hmmm, and tacked on a few dots, then a question mark. Vila never mistook carnal intent.

Carefully, Blake cut out and pocketed his favourite photo of Nav Rul. For clarity’s sake he could look to Avon no more than to Kuvvetli. Avon treated the assassination as his humouring of an idiosyncratic compulsion of Blake’s. Condoning it, but just so that Blake would be grateful he condoned it. Too late, Blake thought it might be prudent after all to keep distance between them, as Avon until lately had insisted upon. Blake had always pushed as near as possible. Once given a taste of true nearness, though, he realised the wisdom behind that traditional aloofness of Avon’s. It was practical -- dislike kept them free to go on being each what he was, undisturbed. As an enemy Avon would never have the power to change Blake, divert him from his path. As a confidant, though, he was damn subversive. Blake feared he might compromise to accommodate Avon, to make room for Avon in his mind.

Tired of the insults with which Avon and Vila took out their admiration of each other’s hands, Blake left. He dropped in next door to see how Cally was going. With her Auron resilience she had healed rapidly. Of the last week on Kisir Kadin, though, she knew nothing, having lost it to the amnesia Kuvvetli had cured her with. The accidental fellowship which had germinated between Blake and her hadn’t yet withered to awkwardness. Blake thought it would, before long.

“How’s the throbbing head?” she smiled.

He had confessed to a hangover, this morning. “I deserve to keep it, Cally, as a permanent warning against dredging up things I’d clamped the lid on. I repent. Stars, do I ever.”

“Rarely, I expect,” Cally answered, with her knack for solemn teasing. She was wrapped in a blanket, legs curled under her, looking oddly young. Both tired and keyed up with doing nothing, Blake sat beside her. His joints ached and he needed to keep shifting position. With Cally it was easy to be content with quietness. The telepath derived more from silent company than most Terrans did, and unlike most was confident in it. Blake, needing nearness, too, basked in the simple acceptance of hers, enjoying more than thinking. Miles away, she linked his fingers loosely with hers. At times her eyes were like a cloister. It was always the grim compassionate guerrilla Cally whom people leant on when they lost the heart to stand on their own two feet.

“Not thinking of home?” he asked in a while.

“Just chatting to Zelda. Most of my free time I spend in long imagined conversations with her. If I need to work out a thing, I mull it over with her. I do most of my thinking that way, as though there’s two of me. It’s a consoling habit.”

“Wish I had a twin. A complementary half, similar enough to share everything with. What else would you need? I think Terrans as a race are created too dissimilar, or maybe not empathic enough. Compared to Auronar, our mutual understanding is abysmal, even when we love one another. It’s such a shame.”

“When together we were self-sufficient. Since leaving — I’ve only pretended to be. It’s impossible to be so near to anyone else.”

“I can imagine. After Zelda, too many differences.”

“Jenna once told me looking for similarity is crawling back into the womb.”

“Did she just? Jenna wouldn’t understand, she’s so ruggedly complete in herself. Good for her if she can get by purely on contrast.” They swapped smiles, feeling it an achievement to agree, being quite unalike themselves.

“What were you thinking of?”

Restlessly, Blake sighed. “Avon.” More than once when Avon had near deserted, hadn’t Cally stayed as loyal to the purpose of the Liberator as he himself? Yet Blake found himself saying, “Sometimes I think Avon’s the only one who wouldn’t resent it if I were more than a mutoid. If I stopped being Blake the rebel and was Roj the human, like before my treatment. But if Avon laughs at selflessness, I wish he’d explain in simple terms what his idea of strength is.”

“He’s merciless in pointing out any deviation from your own standards.”

“Only to prove what a farce my standards are.” He fingered Nav Rul’s photo in his pocket like a talisman. No, he was content with the way things were. “Sorry, Cally, I’m just champing at the bit. I’m not good at waiting.”

Cally’s eyes were a twin brown to Avon’s, without that voracious look that spoilt his in moments of animation. Wrapped in his work the technician’s eyes would be mellow; when next moment the ship was in peril they would go ugly with a vicious hunger for life. The Auron’s were fecund with a different richness, deep with a different wisdom. Her hair would be tangled, windswept, wraithlike, instead of short but lush in his fingers. Feeling the paper-thin skin of her knuckles, which nevertheless could twist any trooper’s neck with a swipe to the jaw, Blake thought -- Cally never asks, but she always so longs for you to be as generous in return. Again he was sensing things from her -- a hunger to be touched, which he was far too sympathetic to. The manifold problems of being isolated from one’s species struck him anew. “Can you --” he asked, solicitous. “I mean, are Terrans any use to you at all, for making love? It must be dreadfully lonely.”

“Erotically we are not so impossibly different. Though I find among Terrans there is much sublimation of emotional or psychological problems and conflicts into the matter. Our anatomies vary slightly -- that tends to spook Terrans, who are still a xenophobic species.” She smiled at him. “On Auron I never needed to learn solitary eroticism, as you people survive on, and that would still not be my choice. Though an Auron would mean so much more, I would not be ungrateful for Terran touch.”

There was that same cold draught blowing where a part of her mind should be, preyed on like he had been. Feeling brave and wistful, he said, “I guess I’ve nothing to give you.”

Humorous eyes warmed him. “Why do you guess, Blake?”

“I was thinking maybe Jenna would be more of a prospect for you.”

“A friend would be a welcome prospect. Gender is a small matter, particularly when both Terran genders are different than me. I know it is no negligible thing for you yourself, though. Jenna told me so in tones of purring appreciation and regret.”

He bit his lip and smiled, both together. “Jenna’s too much for me. But, Cally — if I could be of any help, it would delight me. If you tell me how. You needn’t worry about how to with me, I’m reconciled to being solitary. It’s spoiling someone you like that you miss as much as anything.”

//I would like to be spoiled a little, my fellow fighter and fellow stray.//

The skin under her eyes was sunken, there was a pronounced hollow in her cheek. He kissed it, enchanted. Cally was safe, because strong. In the more neurotic Avon, Blake sensed a propensity to cling which he ran a mile from.

It was easy, just to follow her dreamy mind-whispered guidance. Once an impression appeared in his mind, telepathed by Cally, of Zelda’s rapt loving. He thought the momentarily shared picture the loveliest thing he’d known in years.

Apparently it was working mildly okay for Cally. A friendly mouth was a friendly mouth, he supposed. He thought Auron anatomy rather nice. With Cally singing to herself of Auron joys, Blake let his mind wander astray, wherever it would.

#

Blake had composed, these past years, a repertoire of erotic dreams featuring Stev. They tended toward profoundly tender conversations, much humour, and an intense poetic passion which, naturally, would never have died had Stev not. Thoroughly romantic and idealised. This time, for once, he didn't think of his make-believe lover. Instead he latched onto the once he had known Avon’s trousers to be open -- when he needed Blake’s support to urinate. The acrid smell came vividly back to Blake, the timeless peaceful dawn, the sight of Avon handling himself. Avon didn’t sleep with anyone else. Avon in everything was self-sufficient, enjoying his own company, and no doubt ideal dreams of Anna.

There under the rose and apple-green sky those fingertips could so easily have jiggled a little, kneaded lightly, settled into a stroke. Blake would have been grateful to keep a sturdy arm there while Avon did this as well. Hedonistic Avon pandering to his own appetites, selfish and untouchable, caressing himself into that rare genuine smile. And Blake honoured to be there next to his beauty, burly shoulder waiting patiently on the off chance that Avon might care to lean into it. Infatuated with Avon’s sexuality, Blake imagined damp whimpers rising in pitch, fingers teasing out the fragrant milk. He was racked with the tactile longing to feel Avon saturate his palm -- jam gently into it and find his fleeting bliss-in-hell there. But his world fell in ruins when, forgetting Blake, Avon soaked only his own belly. Crucifying himself on discipline, Blake’s fist went gnarled at his side. Damn it, he needed to touch where the man was tenderest –

#

Blake rationalised. In his imagination he hadn’t lain a finger on Avon himself, which was some kind of standard kept. Nothing wrong with a bit of fantasy. And he was dispassionate now, it meant nothing. These nuisance aberrations were only human. This time he was definitely back to normal.

In the dark indigo night the pale patch of a face appeared before him. “Hullo.” Hands out to feel his way, he recognised the jacket. “It would be you. What are you doing pussyfooting around like an unquiet ghost?”

“Seeing who else is pussyfooting, perhaps.” Avon held lightly onto him to keep his bearings.

“Is anyone?”

“Only you and me.”

“Ah.” At a loss what to say next Blake offered, “Care to come and pass the time of night over coffee? Your insomnia must be contagious. There’s no night on the Liberator, you don’t notice it until you’re planetside but that constant prying light gets on your nerves. Pity not to enjoy the nights while we’re here.” Tonight Blake had an aversion to sleep, to shutting down and shutting off, to negating his senses.

“Let’s enjoy the evening outside then.” Avon’s eyes were adjusting to the dark. He noticed Blake’s shirt looked like it had just been thrown on, rumpled, untucked and hanging open. Further, he noticed that Blake was becoming slowly embarrassed and then shifty. For a Terran, Avon had uncanny instinct, Cally said. And in the space of a moment he went cold on Blake for Cally’s sake, then went cold on Cally for Blake’s sake. “It’s not like you to prowl about half dressed, Blake. Are you hot?”

“It”s a hot night,” Blake tried.

“It isn’t, you know. I’d say all of ten degrees.” Presently he added, “I was quite prepared for Kuvvetli to convert you, but not Cally.”

“Don’t be funny.” Blake shuffled his feet.

Avon had never seen anyone actually shuffle their feet before and was charmed. “You smell of her.” He did, but mostly he smelt of himself. Fresh sweat on lingering old sweat, sweetish tobacco, himself. The underneaths of the forearms Avon held were fleshy and veined. Avon didn’t risk letting his mouth stop. “Lured into taking pity, were you? She pretends to welcome parasites but only to turn and leech from you instead. Telepaths are chameleons, they mutate to fit everybody’s different cracks. Found a crack in you, did she?”

“Look, I want none of your interpretations.”

“Just interested.”

“That isn’t half obvious. It’s beyond me why the private life I don’t have is suddenly a hobby of yours.”

Because, thought Avon, it was logical to pass up Cally’s approval, which for all her gentleness came at a high price, in favour of sponging off the ungentle Blake. Which he no longer doubted he could do. Not that he was a cheapskate, emotionally -- or, if he was, the loss of Anna was to blame. No, it was just the entertaining challenge of getting everything for nothing -- and Cally was far too wide awake to fall for that. He said, in dulcet tones, “I suppose this is a new way you’ve dreamt up of martyring your libido?”

Blake wasn’t used to people discussing his libido. “You, Avon, are a constant source of flabbergastment to me.”

“I have a stake in the state of your libido, you know.” Avon was caught in the fascination of gambling, tense at his proximity in the dishevelled clothes, gouging the soft unders of the arms.

“Eh?”

“It sours your temper, drags you off on tangents like liberating backwater planets for pretty natives, and generally undermines your spirits, which undermines our safety.”

Blake threw his hands out in a gesture, to get rid of Avon’s. “While your problem is your iconoclastic urge to poke holes in me until I fall apart.”

“You misunderstand me deliberately, don’t you? I have a theory. One half of you -- named Roj Blake – sees everything, decides what’s fit for the other half -- which is named Rebel Hero -- and censors it. We only meet Rebel Hero. I want to meet Roj Blake, lurking in those cobwebbed corners of your mind you’re so shy of.”

“Kerr – I’ve warned you away from playing with my mind, it’s too risky. With the condition the treatment left it in, I’m not answerable for it. And you’re right, I’m determined not to understand you. When you get that half brazen, half coy look I tend to think it isn’t healthy to. I can’t keep up with your twists and turns, and what I follow I wish I hadn’t. We’re incompatible, and given half a chance I’d return with thanks to the familiarity of hating you. Liking you is a problem I can’t handle.”

Since he was agitated saying this, not calm, Avon dismissed it as death throes. “Your universe would be lucid had you listened to me last night.”

“What mystic significance did last night have? I only remember getting stoned.”

“That’s because you believe that if you don’t look it will go away. Hammering things through your less than acquiescent skull takes a bit of doing.”

“No wonder, with you talking in riddles like a sphinx.”

“If you ask me to I’ll drop the crypticism. The deal is mutual frankness.”

“What deal? I haven’t agreed to any deal.”

“And I’m willing to begin, but I have to be sure it’s what you want. I do nothing until you ask. That means everything is your own fault -- remember that and we’ll get on fine.”

Avon promising to drop his mask proved too intriguing. Despite the fact he’d pledged wilful ignorance of Avon a moment ago, Blake said, “I’m asking, then. Crypticism is maybe the worst of your frustrating habits.”

“I didn’t mean to frustrate you, Blake.” He smiled -- cryptically. “I envy Cally.”

“Eh?” This fellow, thought Blake, knows no shame.

“Don’t take that the wrong way,” he added a trifle late. “I mean, I’d like to be granted a period which would be wiped out afterwards. Say a week of license in which to do all the unbalanced things, all the things you refrain from doing because you couldn’t take knowing you’d done them, afterwards. Haven’t you ever wished that? Imagination needn’t harass you any longer, you’d have done it all.”

Blake laughed. “Or perhaps as a last request. I think I’m entitled to a last request. Brief abandon.”

“But you,” Avon continued, “are perhaps content with your Payter, your Renor, your Carl. The children were real, the crime a fabrication -- you were handed on a platter what so many of us long for, the transgression without the guilt. The way you think, Blake, is a compensation for what you do. For instance you never give in.”

“Correct, so what’s the point of making everything between us into a competition?” Then Avon accidentally brushed his hip with a hand. It winded Blake as though from a punch in the belly. Ironically he thought -- and I still call this a competition? He doesn’t need to fight me any more -- just lay a finger on me and I’m outmanoeuvred.

“But thinking about surrender is enough. If you imagine dirt you can go on being clean, that I gather is how you work. Only it follows that the things you imagine putrefy further the longer you impose your purity. Somewhere, I expect, you have an unholy stew in there. I’ve not yet located precisely where.”

“You’re warped, I honestly believe it,” Blake told him, though tolerantly enough.

“Therefore, your kids exist, as they always have and always will, even if in cold reality they remain untouched.”

Between his teeth Blake said, “You’re barking up the wrong tree.”

He laughed. “I know, the Federation’s choice of crime isn’t really you. Give me a chance, Roj. Let me try this one on for size.” Grabbing Blake’s arms again he continued in the lovely devil’s voice Blake feared he would soon hear once too often. The white moons were rising behind Blake, bleaching Avon’s face and throat. “You were one with the children in spirit — a victim, you, never the perpetrator. It was the court that did the abusing. They dragged you into court to publicly violate you, mentally and emotionally. You wished the kids with fictional violation in their heads were in court with you, because you belonged beside them as the prey and they belonged beside you as the innocent. You cared for them, fraternal, you wanted to hug them in fellowship, bury your faces together before the hostile world a moment. Four raped children -- Payter, Renor, Carl, and Roj. Because after the probes and eliminators which took your brain apart you, Blake, understand being ravaged only too well. But that court scene, in which you weren’t criminal but victim, was just play-acting, wasn’t it? A trial with no crime, a make-believe — like the fantasies too dangerous to become realities that a lonely rebel might have. Thus it was nothing more than a nightmare for the children. As it’s nothing more than — a dream? -- for you. The Justice Department was the rapist, you hated the Justice Department. But the shadowy man in the dock, only costumed as a criminal, who’ll never lay a cruel finger on you but who falls in with the make-believe -- did you hate him? Would you condemn him if he existed for you, and whose face would you paint him with? You’re too badly damaged, warped like me, to subsist on things wholesome and gentle and good. Fair enough, but let me point out that there is masochism and there is masochism. Kynalin mutilates, Roj, and martyrdom hurts, but being fantasy, he’s harmless no matter what you ask him to do. I think he’s the private life you’re famous for not having, and you need him if you’re not to go off the rails.”

Blake, bewildered, disturbed more deeply than he cared to probe, snatched an arm away, leaving Avon to hang onto the other. He knew he was quivering, and that Avon might notice. Avon was too ambitious, he wasn’t equal to this. He grumbled something to swat him away -- “You’re a menace, you ought to be locked up.”

“But you let me free. Remember? I’m taking you up on it.” Avon caught his hand to twine their fingers together. Unlike with Cally’s, there was no physical contrast for breathing space or refuge. The honesty of it harrowed Blake. “Kerr –”

“If you’re agreeable,” he said, “I might do anything for you. Just thought I’d warn you.” Then Avon withdrew, leaving Blake to plonk down in the sand, to go sweetly mad, confused as hell.

#

Vila was sprawled on his stomach, chin on one fist, juggling dice with the other. His eyes slanted up as Avon came in, high on fantastical plots and the thought of Blake’s fluttery hand in his. “Found his Achilles heel at last, huh?”

The technician stopped and looked at him carefully.

“You know, Blake won’t crack as easy as you think. After weathering the professionals he won’t crumble at a little teasing from you.”

Avon said, “Have a little faith, Vila. Blake’s no match for me because at bottom he doesn’t want to be. That’s the beauty of it.”

“Sure, he might pretend to cave in for a while. Only as a holiday from his unbowed-and-unretreating, solid as a rock role, which anyone would go crazy keeping to for years at a time without a breather. You being a harmless kind of enemy, he can afford to act soft with you. But don’t kid yourself, he’s at least as tough as you are. So if I were you I’d stick to a gun draw at twenty paces. Fair and above board. The way you’re playing it — no rules, anything goes – it’s tempting fate. He’s a split personality, and if he needs to he can hit lower than you can.”

Avon stood over Vila’s feet, where the thief couldn’t see without twisting his neck. Which he didn’t. “Maybe it isn’t a battle I’m staging, Vila,”

“I thought of that. Have you thought that might be what he takes it for?”

“He’s the one who asked for a truce. Which means he can’t be fighting. As a rule he’s not given to lying.”

“I wouldn’t trust him. I mean, the guy’s likeable, it’s not his fault his brain’s as messed up as a mutoid’s. Nice fellow or not, though, you’d be rash to push it any further. Distract him from his terrorising, terrific, make him pine a little if it amuses you. But to place yourself within his reach would be a big mistake. Promise if you must but don’t deliver. He... he’s into dreams, pretty mirages on the horizon to chase, not reality. If he catches you he’ll take a closer look and throw you down again, to chase something more ethereal. What he can have he finds wasn’t worth his wanting it. Comes with fighting the impossible fight for utopia, probably.”

“Maybe I have the power to make settling for reality worthwhile for him.”

“Anyway, he’s too hung up. Sink to him and he’ll despise you as much as he does himself. Him and his Alpha guilt trips – he’ll find some way to take it out on you.” Vila never stopped playing with his dice, though his clever hands dropped them once or twice.

“So what’s your interest?”

“I don’t want you provoking him too far. You know what Cally said, he’ll rush off and immolate himself, like he raided Servalan’s headquarters to purge his guilt over Gan. Which may be the stuff of rebel legend, but being there wasn’t fun. You always did make him a little crazy, and I’m scared of him crazy.”

Patient, Avon knelt on his heels beside the thief. “It’s gone too far.”

“For him?”

“For me.”

“An Alpha to your balls, you always were too picky.” The thief flipped onto his back. “I knew he was that way. That night we took off on Kwima, I saw him dancing with some fellow in a quayside bar. Never considered it before that because he gazes at Jenna so wistfully. He admires her more than you, but nature’s against him there. You, though --” Their eyes met. “I thought you were shocked by the seedier side of life in the detention centre?”

It was a less than propitious way to meet, Avon had always thought. Vila had first become a face distinct from the prison crowd when he noticed that the sad-faced thief who slept in the bunk beneath him was being harassed, persistently, by a particular male guard. It didn’t take long for even the sheltered Avon to work out what the guard was after. And true enough, it had appalled him. Anna’s gentle love had not long ago been wrested from him -- beneath the fury he was still in a romantic tender frame of mind. Jail, with its bestial cruelty and flagrant injustice, was jarring. When in jail do as the jailbirds do, jettison the humanity, he decided -- but more immediately there was this loquacious pickpocket, who’d adopted Avon as the butt of his rough camaraderie when Avon was disowned by class and family. Who would be raped if no one did anything. So Avon, the aristocratic prisoner, bluffed his way to an audience with an officer. She was incongruously decent, one of Leylan’s kind, and the guard was transferred to the next cell block.

Avon hadn’t expected gratitude for his good deed. But the way the pickpocket dropped him... it didn’t trouble the Alpha, but it did bewilder him. Not until months later did Avon work out that Vila mistrusted his motives. Believing Alphas were bred to prey on people, he’d been afraid that Avon had heavied the guard away so he was free to press his own luck.

So Vila was the last person to whom Avon would confess any ambiguity of sexuality. Cramped on a ship with the little thief, Avon, miffed at the suspicion, never peeked out from behind his frigid-as-a-computer image. Paranoid Vila — he considered himself so vulnerable, and was so bitter towards anyone who looked like taking advantage of it. Avon hadn’t worried about whether Vila saw the comparative respect in his hostile stance or not. Since that early episode, he had degenerated. Though not... Blake’s way.

“I was, Vila,” he answered quite gently. “But that was unfair molestation. This is fair molestation. Previously seduction never entered my head -- but if he’s as kinky as one of your soma-soaked attempts at navigation, it seems a waste not to exploit the fact. After all, in his eyes, what else have I got going for me? I’m no brave freedom fighter like Cally and my personality can’t match Jenna’s -- however, I’m not too bad looking.”

Vila said, “It’s funny; I don’t trust either of you with the other, you always did bring out each other’s worst. Who’s going to suffer the consequences?”

“I promise you I have it under perfect control.”

The thief sniffed, scratched his belly, churned his mouth around then sidled his eyes over to Avon’s. It looked as though he were trying to think of a hieroglyphical way to put it, but he ended up saying, “A hole is a hole is a hole, isn’t it?”

It was perhaps absurd to feel flattered by a blunt Delta with more sense of expediency than discrimination. But Vila clung to his own version of privacy and what scant independence he had with a resentment Avon had always empathised with. Standing, Avon wandered over to the wall, lowered himself down on his own blankets. “I knew you weren’t picky, Vila, but I don’t understand why you’re that apprehensive.”

“Then at least tell me nothing nasty’s going to happen.”

The thief was always there, and he knew instinctively more than anyone else. Nothing was beneath Vila’s comprehension and nothing in the galaxy took him by surprise. The breadth and robustness, if not the altitude of his thought struck Avon.

The technician’s protectiveness ran deeper than any games he might be playing. “Not to you.”

#

“Haven’t we had this argument before?” Cally asked.

“I remember,” said Blake. “I won.”

“And two days later was the first time I’ve heard you utter the words, _I was wrong_.”

“Well. Now’s the second. I shouldn’t have uttered them. Cally, that was the circumstances going wrong — where’s the harm in giving the idea another go?”

“It’s not a matter for joke, and the harm is that you’re yielding to extremist tendencies. You have to draw the line, Blake.”

“Not here.”

“When are you going to stop saying that? If there is a genuine Terra Nostra I don’t want to know about it. And nor do I want it to know about me.” Cally leant back in her chair, jamming her arms across her chest.

Two Kisiri days had passed since Kuvvetli had left them in tents beyond the city walls. A hideyhole in an abandoned street of Chingis had been found, and the Liberator crew was smuggled into the city. Underground rumour must thrive on Kisir Kadin, or else there was a spy among Kuvvetli’s people. For yesterday, while exploring a bazaar with Cally, Blake had been waylaid by a native who claimed she belonged to the local sect of the Terra Nostra. The Terra Nostra was widespread in Chingis, an earthy and drug-plagued city. Blake and Cally were told that there were in fact two Terra Nostras in human space. The native gave a potted history: twenty years ago, the Federation decided to infiltrate the Milky Way’s major crime syndicate, the Terra Nostra. This organisation severely undermined Federation control, selling recreational drugs to compete with the officially sanctioned mind-repressants, harbouring criminals of every kind, leeching from the legitimate economy. The Federation was ambitious to rule on both sides of the law. So undercover Federation agents joined the Terra Nostra, climbed up its fast and slippery ladder. Today, all the influential people in the crime club were Federation loyalists. While the takeover was in progress, however, a few members who recognised what was happening defected, and kept alive a separate Terra Nostra which stayed faithful to the original anarchic philosophy of the club. This “genuine” Terra Nostra hid itself on obscure planets like Kisir Kadin, and it was rabidly anti-Federation.

The native requested that Blake meet with her boss, who would like to negotiate a trade. Willing to hear the group out, Blake, Cally and Avon had -- without Kuvvetli’s knowledge — gone to a certain nearby bar at a certain time. The Terra Nostra negotiator had just left, after asking the famous Avon and the rumoured Orac to help their genuine Terra Nostra launch a coup for the Federation-run Terra Nostra. This was to be done by kidnapping, from afar, that club’s mammoth computer network. The whole ambitious project could be completed here in Chingis, the representative had said, given his inside information, a high-class hacker like Avon and Orac’s unrivalled power.

Cally thought any Terra Nostra, whether aligned with the Federation or dead against it, too dirty to dabble in. Blake was looking mulish of jaw and depressed of eye. He could feed off his own wilful faith and nothing else indefinitely. But it meant going round in ever narrowing circles, and he did prefer to have people’s blessing.

Avon’s opinion didn’t help. “Considerations of consistency,” the technician said, “don’t enter into it. I for one have ceased to be surprised at anything you would stoop to or anything you would refuse to stoop to. Either you have a hyperactive conscience, which makes living with you like navigating a minefield, or a charismatic vacuum that drains any suggestion of conscience in rebel heads within light years. Depending, I can only suppose, on which side of bed you fall out of in the morning.”

“We enjoyed that -- are you also going to entertain us with a constructive opinion?”

“Why? Sense, to you, is something to fly in the face of. By talking sense I merely whet your appetite for rebellion.”

“If I have the grace to ask, you can have the damn grace to answer. In phrases of one syllable, now.”

Glibly Avon said, “I have a proposition for you.”

“That’s all I need.”

“Trade with that weasel and you’ll end floating face down in a sewer. Which is your privilege and welcome, but you’re not taking me with you. What’s it to us if the genuine Terra Nostra want to take over the fake Terra Nostra which took over the genuine Terra Nostra twenty years ago?”

“A hell of a lot to human space in general -- but don’t let that give you pause.”

“Instead of wasting our time, let’s do something profitable. Like raid the gambling dens of Chingis. Freedom City was only ever a trial run.”

“You never let slip your winning formula in my hearing.”

“I forgot you weren’t bright enough to guess. Orac.”

“Orac. Wonderful. Hullo, can I play at your table, don’t mind my supercomputer, he’s only a pet.”

“When you have the lame wit under restraint I’ll spell it out. With Orac miniaturised to a fraction his size, I can dupe their machines. Fifteen million, maybe twenty, I can get you.” Leaning his elbows on the table Avon assumed a transparent look of nonchalance. Neither that, nor the fervour underneath, were the least bit real. “Now who ever made you an offer like that before? I don’t throw them away on just anyone.”

Blake was not duly flattered. “Maybe you can fritter away your time and talents on swindles -- get rich quick at the expense of the galaxy. Unfortunately for me my concept of life is more sophisticated. Friends are what I need, not your wretched money.” He stared meaningfully at Avon. “It’s time you learnt not everything is bought and sold.”

“Isn’t it? You’re here trading for your friends.”

“I must despise them, then, mustn’t I?” He _glared_ meaningfully at Avon.

Indifferent, the technician said, “Pick your own strange bedfellows -- each to their own. But yours are too strange for me.”

“As you are smugly aware, the deal hinges on you. Laughable, no doubt, but I was hoping you would volunteer.”

“But, Roj, you just rejected my offer.”

“Is it necessary to make it an interstellar diplomatic event every time I ask a favour?”

“That’s the point, you never do ask. You only sidestep and throw your weight around. Why don’t you try tweaking heartstrings, you’re so shamelessly good at it with the rest of the crew.”

Blake hit the table lightly, longing to get angry, but feeling constrained. “I haven’t the leisure to search for yours. As your good deed for the year, just give a simple reply.”

“Ask a simple question.”

“Will you help me,” Blake growled at the stained table.

Avon only hedged again. Marking time until Cally disappeared, he played verbal ping pong, which kept Blake happy and gave himself time to think. “Counting on my blessing is one thing, but I hope you’re not counting on your monk’s? Your conscience would be an attraction in any circus but his isn’t so acrobatic. And knowing his ilk, he’s fonder of it than he is of you.”

Blake wondered if he’d ever told the priest about shooting that deranged native. Perhaps he should have been stoned to death with Avon eleven days ago. It would have been simpler, and possibly more just. “My actions hardly need Kuvvetli’s sanction.”

Blake’s bad temper was wearing thin, which Avon thought a pity. “News to him. You’re game to sin behind his back in his own city? Don’t let me forget the loyalty you’re capable of.”

“It’s black and white,” Blake snapped. This Terra Nostra overture was a gift — the opportunity to get back into the job, away from the temptations spawned in idleness. “I am going to do this, and due to a dearth of serious objection and indeed serious anything else you, whether you know it or not, are going to co-operate.”

“You realise these underworld thugs you intend prostituting me to are as big an enemy to Kuvvetli here as the Federation? And likely to become a good sight bigger with your help. You haven’t even finished the saviour act yet and you’ve forgotten your monk. He was the apple of your eye three days back. Blake, I believe you are fickle.”

“While you,” he nodded with equanimity, “are cunning, specious, vicious-natured, and you have a putrid sense of humour. Now it’s established we have no illusions, can we shake hands on this Terra Nostra deal?” He offered his across the table.

If he accepted that steady hand, Avon knew, he accepted Blake’s premise that all which went before was mockery, a mutual joke, and agreed there was to be no more of it. Blake never needed to bluff, he was quite capable of declaring that to be that and treating Avon from here on as the stranger he used to be. This handclasp, curt, calm and witnessed, would negate the other night’s. And Cally still hadn’t obliged him by vanishing. The technician sighed – he’d just have to embarrass Blake into a private talk. “You’re not up to your honey-tongued standard, Blake. You haven’t even persuaded Cally yet -- and she must be pretty gullible, to sleep with a faggot.”

Blake rose to his feet, came round the table and cuffed Avon’s jaw with a loose fist. “Mind your mouth. No one gave you a license to say anything you please.”

Though the sting lasted only a moment, Avon looked at Blake with dazed eyes. “And no one gave you a license to do that.” To Blake the gesture was an easy substitute for talking, nothing to be taken to heart. Not that he could imagine taking such a short cut with anyone else -- it implied an intimacy he’d barely guessed was there. A picture of his brother’s stern face came to Avon, the eyes as turbulent as Avon’s own, not like Fyfe’s at all. It had been a triumph to provoke a hot storm in the dispassionate Fyfe. Blake as presumptuous as his brother meant Blake as intimate as his brother, so Avon smiled. “But I’ll permit you the privilege. Maybe now you’ll get rid of her so we can negotiate.”

“Must we?”

“I ask merely for a hearing, and you’re quibbling?”

Raucously Cally scraped back her chair. “I’ll leave you pair to quarrel. Safest if we return singly — give me a ten minute start.” She touched Blake’s shoulder, absent-mindedly; he watched her with sorry eyes as she left the inn.

“Do I have your attention?” Avon inquired.

“Vulture,” said Blake, but a little too fondly. “It will disappoint you but she already knew.”

“That inept, were you?”

He quirked his mouth. “I dare say. But on Auron, actually, gender differentiation has been all but lost, what with cloning — there you sleep with people and hardly notice which they are. Now make it snappy. Whatever it is you’re after, you know the inevitable answer.”

Blake stayed propped on a hip against the table, and Avon was content to talk up to him. “If we do this trade you’ll have to call the Liberator in early — probably tomorrow, after the assassinations. You’ll kill Nav Rul, Mustakim will kill the Shah. Then I’ll earn your Terra Nostran death contracts for whomever you have an itch to hand it out to next. After which you leave Kisir Kadin.” He paused. “And after which I leave you.”

“So that’s it?” Blake asked levelly. “You want out.”

Avon shrugged. “How long do you expect the Liberator will stay functional the way things are?”

“Recently I’ve begun to think in terms of weeks. There’s a — stench of disintegration about her.”

“That’s what I suspected. You’re working up to your suicidal culmination. While I have my own peculiar martyrdom in the name of revenge to be getting on with. We must both be in a bad way, don’t you think, to walk of our own free will into such futures?”

“Is the idea that we say goodbye now?”

“Precisely. There won’t be much leisure tomorrow. And late tomorrow night, as soon as the Terra Nostra job is finished, I plan to be in the Chingis bars with my portion of the Liberator’s wealth, finding me a ship.”

“Courteous of you not to take mine.”

“My only immediate need is a one way passage to a detention centre. Rather inglorious for the Liberator.” Avon looked up. “It’s a funny thing, but at times I have an instinct that we’ll both lose some kind of balance when we split up. That from there it will be downhill all the way. Though the idea of you as a lucky charm is paradoxical to say the least. Together we manage badly, it will be interesting to see if we manage worse apart.”

Blake was mutilating the splintery wood of the table with ragged fingernails. “Well,” he remarked. “It’s a pity the last thing I did was swipe you across the jaw.” He smiled, then glanced at Avon. The smile mellowed, to become sad and honest.

“Naturally -- there is an alternative.”

“Ah.” The smile disappeared. Avon missed it; no one had contemplated him with unfeigned and undisguised tenderness for years.

“On certain conditions,” he said, “I’m prepared to give up, or at least postpone, my proposed hell. The contemplation of which is very dear to me. I want Shrinker. The thing is, I’m no longer quite certain if he’s worth more than you.” Blake only looked grave. “So I have a second proposition.”

“As I indicated,” the rebel said quietly, “I’ve no objection to listening.” He leant there, impassive so that Avon wouldn’t be hampered by knowing what he was thinking.

“Crime, if it’s worth the name, is computer run. With the data here in Chingis they want me to break into the network of the Federation-infiltrated Terra Nostra and override it.”

“So the gentleman explained.”

“Imagine. Me let loose in their underground system with Orac. If they’re in need of my expertise they’re thick enough to be left a mile behind me. Particularly as they aren”t familiar with Orac and its capacities. I believe they can be caught off guard by the ingenuity of both it and me.”

“Fate help them,” Blake remarked with fellow-feeling.

“I can work a double-cross. Orac assumes control of both Terra Nostra systems — and keeps control. We keep Orac. Behold, you become a crime tsar. The crime tsar. Forget your spiritual aesthetics and your romanticised libido, now that’s my idea of beauty.”

“Never have I heard a more extravagantly fantastical scheme,” said Blake, though still with the politely noncommittal manner.

“But you like it anyway.”

“You haven’t finished -- what happens then?”

“Then you have a license to do anything you please. You’re not to go along with my things, on the contrary, whatever you wish is yours.”

He rubbed his jaw. “And what is there left for a wreck like me to wish?”

“Come now. I have few desires worth the effort but you’re such a wealth of impossible longings. There’s your avenging angel bit. If your heart’s really set on blowing the heads off well-meaning public administrators, I can arrange it so both your bloodlust and my situational preferences are catered for. We can do it long distance. No more the uncertainty of you oscillating from one galactic rim to another.”

“The only two ways I know how to live are oscillating or behind bars.”

With the ghost of a smile, Avon remembered Cally saying... _and who will you cage there?_ “I can build you a stronghold -- safe as a Federation prison. Find a world with a young sun, congenial, apart, a patch of blue sky and green grass. And I’ll make it our fortified castle, invisible to any but friends -- with the most magnificent defence system in human space. No one will touch us.”

“With singing birds and tossing seas and lily-white snow in the mountains?”

“The prettiest world you can locate.”

“My vanity aside, no matter how picturesque I can’t see you locking yourself in there with me.”

“I’m dizzy with running and riddled with the symptoms of combat fatigue. I want security. If that means suffocating in a metal box, so be it. For a long while I’ve suspected it was too late for more than a travesty of security. Twelve locks on the door instead of confidence. In fact it’s too late for more than a travesty of all too many things. You see I haven’t sufficient faith in my sanity to slam the barricades down on myself alone. A single companion I can cope with. There isn’t anyone it can be any more but you.”

“I daren’t speculate why.”

“Let the galaxy rot, Blake; it let you rot. You’re as renegade as me, under siege because you ask too impossibly much of people. You hate the world and the apathetic world hates you. It’s time you learnt the think like the alien you are. To recognise at last that everyone is your enemy.”

“Save you, I presume?”

“If you enter into partnership with me, it will be as equals. That means I look after you and your interests as zealously as me and mine.”

“And the revolution’s interests?”

“Imagine how many Kommissars you can butcher with pirate control of an underground computer network wide as the Milky Way. If not control, at least influence enough to have the Terra Nostra at our feet. Certainly we’ll trade – you get a free hand and their operation gets to survive.”

“Excuse me, Avon, but the means are a little shady.”

“Don’t kid yourself; at this stage any means are good enough for you. Fastidiousness is one luxury we’re both learning to do without. You’re far enough gone to make do with my means --” he smiled -- “like I’m far enough gone to make do with you.”

“From resistance heroes to drug kings overnight. Will you tell Jenna and Cally or is that part mine?”

“They needn’t know. You don’t imagine I’m inviting them along? I never did take to crowds and this is not an opportunity I care to share with your miniature rabble on the Liberator.”

“At this point I know you’re not serious. Tempt me as you like, Avon, but could I forsake the rebellion and face Cally again? She’s always been the ship’s conscience.”

“So don’t face her again. Your crew only complicate matters. Freed of them you wouldn’t have to worry about being democratic. Or see your darling preposterous schemes shot down in flames by inappropriate good sense.”

“You, I take it, won’t be objecting to my darling preposterous schemes?”

“I can indulge you. My way, nothing we want to do will be preposterous.”

“In effect it’s either a farewell scene with you or a farewell scene with them?”

“Put simply, yes. You can tell Jenna she’s too noble to follow you into this fight, while your own nobility lies in your willingness to sink as low as it takes. It would be unnecessarily insulting to add you’d swap her friendship for my face any day.”

Blake tightened his mouth. “You’ve a hide on you, Avon.”

“Truth often strikes one as impudent. As for Vila – we’ll supply him with the wherewithal to debauch himself rotten for the term of his natural life.” Avon fixed his attention on Blake’s midriff. “That’s my alternative to chasing death. Riches galore, freedom unbridled and raw honesty between us. What do you say?”

“You requested a hearing. I’ve heard. I didn’t agree to give a response.”

“Maybe you require evidence that it’s possible. And that I mean what I say.”

“If you’re finished offering me everything I ever wished for and plenty I never did, you can be on your way. Meanwhile I’ll figure out just what it is you’re after. Perhaps it would cut through all this rigmarole if I simply promised to hand over the Liberator within a given time? Spare myself the unlikely sight of you crawling.”

“You think I’m stringing you along? Blake, I realise you’re paranoid about being indebted to me. You probably think I compromise you -- though so far you’ve necessitated more sinking on my part than ascending.” Avon was silent a moment. “Politically it’s insane, but I never underestimated the lure of extremism. This obsession with outside affairs, with abstracts, puzzles me. Concretes, however -- well, wealth is the essential concrete and I spend a correspondingly large portion of my effort on it. And though I have no generic belief in things like loyalty and commitment and charades of good-fellowship – individuals can be concretes too. And I can be as extreme as any fanatic rebel.” Another pause. “If anyone survives around here it ought to be us. Survival’s my forte -- say the word and I’ll see to yours and mine.”

“I think you and me are the last pair it ought to be.”

“The truth is, studying you has rather put me off things suicidal. I’m glutted with your martyrdom, I no longer have the stomach for being bait to catch a torturer, it’s time one of us was a bit more wholesome. With no critical eyes, you’ll be free to get plastered whenever you desire, and I’ll be free to be my viciously misanthropic self. There’ll be no judging one another, judging has no place in — partnership. Vila’s habitual drunkenness wearies one, but you do it with such despairing violence it’s quite diverting. For him it’s natural, but you’re a fine specimen of an Alpha. Exploring what motivates you to inflict these unnatural things on yourself is a fascinating pursuit. But — you won’t need the kynalin, Roj, let’s not get too seriously unnatural.” He waited, gazing past Blake’s skirted flank. “Are you still skeptical? This is something like the scenario I had in mind for Anna and I.”

Blake buried a hand in the depths of his trouser pocket. “All I can say is that I’m not ungrateful.”

“That’s it? Anna, however, was considerably more appreciative.” Avon pursed his lips. “I’ll let the offer stand then. For a short while. But promise me one thing: don’t conveniently ignore it in your usual style. You will at least consider the proposal?”

“Don’t worry. I’m rarely able to avoid _thinking_ about things I know are not for me. If you’ve nothing more to say you better get back. I’ll give you a few minutes before following. I wouldn’t mind a drink, anyway.”

As Avon rose to go Blake detained him with a hand before his chest. “On the off chance,” the rebel said in a monotone, “that you’re serious, I ought to add... you understand, don’t you, that with the webs you weave I can’t afford to take you as serious?”

Avon skirted the hand, saying nothing.

#

The squad of guards began at the far end of the street, combing mathematically through the buildings. Their approach was too leisurely, like a ballet. Cally crouched with him below the windowsill, gun between her knees, head leant back against the wall. Throat long and pale and bumpy. When she looked at him her eyes were acrid and knowing. Underneath the skin was pulled in to form moist wells, tender and yellow-dark. “He’s going to walk straight into this.”

“Who?” Avon said.

“Blake — who do you think?”

“Then he’s on his own. In ten minutes they’ll be level with Vila and the Kisiris across the street. Until then we can’t begin the fight just for Blake.”

“He’ll have left the inn a while ago.”

“No, he was going to give his sorrows a short dousing before he followed us.”

“What did you say to provide him with any?”

“As long as he doesn’t kid himself I’m launching a cavalry charge up that open street. Until the first guard reaches that lane I hold my fire. If he’s fool enough to appear in the next nine minutes he’s ash.”

“Touching, isn’t it. A little distraction fire won’t much hurt your own chances. You take it out on him mercilessly, don’t you?”

“Take what out?”

“The fact that you never could help liking him. It’s hardly fair, Blake’s not to blame.”

“Poor Blake,” smiled the technician. “He’s inconsolably sweet on me. Hook, line and sinker, I fear.”

“He’s not that blind. If I left Zelda for the rebellion, he won’t run away from it with you.”

“Only because comrades like you keep telling him old rebels never retire, they just die -- on the job. This old rebel will be different if I have to kidnap him. I don’t understand how you, if you care for him, can help steady the gun muzzle at his temple while he pulls the trigger.”

“His pledge is to destroy until he is destroyed, as mine is. I empathise but I do not _doubt_.” Glancing out the window she checked the guards” progress.

“Six minutes. Blake doubts, you know. In the end he can’t live up to your standards.” Yet he refuses to give up the effort, Avon thought. As yet he’s not quite unbalanced enough, not quite desperate enough to lean on me. Too many props still to keep him upright, too many ’loyal rebe’ followers pitted against one truly loyal and truly rebel would-be guide. Smashed on kynalin he was almost mine. But, no, he goes to staunch comrade Cally for a patch-up job and so kids himself he doesn’t need my healing. Why do I have to take Blake _apart_ to take him away from all this? Not until he’s black and blue will he be meek enough to listen to me. And I have to help pummel him into amenability, push him down so I can pick the engaging fool up.

Conversational, Avon said, “Everyone covets Blake, don’t they? No wonder, he’s a blank slate and longs for someone to write what they please there, to give him a complete personality again. And he has such large cradling hands. Or he has for you, at least — all they’ve done for me so far is dislocate my jaw. Being queer one deludedly expects he’s able to be as gentle with me as with you. That’s why I was pleased with the discovery. I imagine with you he was very kind, Cally. You neglected to tell him you and I are akin.”

Cally only said, “The moment someone likes you despite your deliberate worst you’re an utter dupe, Avon.”

Too long known, Cally’s face had gone sour in him. She, Avon thought, was just as morbidly fatalistic as Blake. He peeped over the windowsill at the approaching troops. “Two minutes.”

#

Dogged, the thief refused to look up at Blake’s inquisition. He ground sticks into the leather of his boot until they snapped, mouth set wide and lipless in hatred for the whole galaxy and how it treated people.

“Do the details matter?” Mustakim was rash enough to ask.

“Matter, of course they matter, details are everything--” was the crisp retort. Blake questioned relentlessly, pacing with urgent, jittery energy. “Vila, for heaven’s sake.”

“I didn’t see it,” he spat at the floor. “I had my eyes closed.”

“How can you joke?” Thrusting his hand through his hair for the fifth time, Blake averted his eyes from the thief. To see Hediye’s hands shading Cally’s face, with superstitious dread. “Won’t someone please lay a blanket over her?” the native was appealing.

“There isn’t time to squander on blankets, we know what corpses look like. Would everybody kindly organise themselves? We have to find a safer hideout. You’re all in danger here, one corpse I think is a sufficiency.”

Rocking miserably, Vila chanted, “She was with Avon on the other side of the street. Avon was covering her attack. Ask Avon. Avon knows.”

Finally Blake left the cluster of people. Avon was outside, inconspicuous and alone. Spattered with garish sun he was scavenging weapons from three troopers who lay contorted on the dirty cobblestones. At Blake’s appearance he stilled, crouching, a hand fluttering to settle gracefully on black cloth like the flies did.

In the way you notice irrelevancies when an emotionally momentous event is happening, Blake glimpsed in him something wild and afraid, as the fractious ink eyes squinted and the skin of his lips clung on them parting. Avon confronted him touching the dead man as if for support. Too pale in the sunlight, his shoulders too frail. Blake’s throat thickened in adoration, which passed and left him tired.

“Kerr,” Blake demanded his attention, though not a muscle of him was moving. “What happened?”

“They shot her.”

At this stating of the obvious Blake lost interest in his questions. He stepped down the gutter, watched a trickle of oily water down the street in which the sun brought out a false rainbow. “No-one I’ve teamed with you on a job ever died before.”

“It happens, Blake.” Sketching a helpless gesture Avon stood. His left cheek was split, making any expression lopsided. “I failed to see one trooper on a roof. Her foray was too fast and reckless, how was I to provide adequate cover?”

“You might have been more diligent.”

“Is it my responsibility to keep gung-ho guerrillas out of trouble?

“My friends, Avon, are your responsibility. If you were sincere in what you said, that you’d guard my interests as your own.”

“But you didn’t want what I offered. You more or less said no.”

Everything was said in a murmur. “And on such a pointless mission.” Slumping against a wall, Blake kneaded his temples, then faced the brick, leaning on an elbow. Tentative, Avon came up behind him. “Don’t be upset. It happens.”

“And where was I, Kerr, what was I doing? In a wine bar day-dreaming of betraying what she believed in –”

Hanging onto a Federation handgun, Avon clumsily twisted an arm about his waist.

“Your damnable patch of blue sky.” Blake inclined his head towards the other man. The crook of the neck and collar seemed a refuge for his face, and for a moment Blake hugged him, spasmodic and tight, hands working like a cat’s paws softening the place it means to sleep.

“Roj —” Avon didn’t attempt to clutch at him in return. “Don’t hold it against me, all right?”

#

Hiding out in a slum, long desolate, Blake had Kuvvetli say funeral prayers. When Avon would have joined in he met with brusqueness. “You don’t believe in this sentiment, this wishful thinking -- no one invited you to pretend.”

Avon was oblivious to the ceremony, his only purpose was to stand near Blake. But notwithstanding that the remark was unfair because neither did Blake believe in it, he wandered away.

Blake listened to the chants. To him they were just damn depressing music by which to meditate on the lost beauty of Cally. She was strength and kindness, qualities in dangerously short supply among the survivors. Blake felt himself weak and cruel, saw Avon as weak and cruel. Afterwards he roamed around in a grim frame of mind. Once he caught Vila telling a butterfly he’d caught gently in his quick hands, before he sadly let the creature go, “If Avon failed to see a trooper then he wasn’t looking awfully hard. Avon never fails to see troopers. There was nowhere to hide on that roof.”

The squalor cast Blake further down. Vandalised street signs, the stench of fish and damp decaying wood, pets turned feral and predatory. Chingis’ sea had risen, drowning the outermost streets. Avon fiddled in the doorway. Taking an indirect route over Blake paused, as if on his way past. “Hasn’t anyone seen to that gash of yours yet?”

“Who do you expect to do that? Vila perhaps?” He was bitter that the thief had turned against him.

“Don’t play with it, your hands are filthy. There’s antiseptic somewhere, I suppose I can fix the thing. Move where it’s light.”

“Don’t trouble yourself. I’ve suffered enough of your tender loving care.”

“I said move. So move.”

Instead of coming in to the fire in the dusty grate, Avon sat on the steps near a streetlamp. “I fail to see the point when than rag has more germs than my face.”

“Don’t fuss -- hold your chin up.” Blake began to dab the liquid on, zealously.

“Don’t get excited.” His victim twitched away. The idea is a few drops, not half the bottle.” Not meaning to, the sullen eyes met Blake’s, then flickered away again.

“A stitch or two wouldn’t go amiss.”

“No one’s sewing me and that means particularly not you.”

“Well, don’t abuse me if your face starts rotting. You’ll spoil it if you’re not careful. Usually you’re so finicky.”

“You mean usually I’m so vain.”

“With those classic looks I don’t blame you too much.” Balancing on his heels, Blake seemed to be in a conversational mood. “Why abandon a good foible now?”

“Pity the rest of me isn’t as enviable... don’t you think?”

Blake paused, then assumed a heartening tone. “You haven’t eaten tonight, unless my prying eye deceives me. Come on in and get some stew down you.”

“I’d rather not.”

“If you’re feeling particularly antisocial I can bring a bowl out. Can’t have you losing that lovely pampered plumpness.” At Avon’s grimace he added, “I’d miss it even if you wouldn’t.” He demonstrated with a hand on Avon’s soft middle.

“I indicated I’m not hungry.”

“Mustakim has some honey pastry -- sticky stuff, very bad for you, but I know you have a sweet tooth.” Noticing Avon was shivering, Blake said, uncertain, “I know you and she were close, Kerr.”

“I’m just a bit under the weather.” He added, “Are you going to stay here?”

Blake gathered this meant Avon would like him to. The technician kept, his head down. So Blake lingered there, feeling calm and sturdy now, prepared to buttress others. Meanwhile stating to himself he was, perhaps, pretty badly in love with this man, and it was time to start making allowances for the fact.

Before long he wondered, out of the blue, if Avon could be crying. Quirks had begun to show -- Blake distinguished his jaw muscles working, and the trembling hadn’t lessened. The answer had to be no, but just to reassure himself Blake said, “Kuvvetli’s having a message sent to the President to coincide with the assassinations, claiming responsibility and saying this policy will be pursued on other worlds. Not that it’s likely to get read even if it gets through.”

No answer. Blake became convinced -- if Avon wasn’t crying, he was near enough to it. Just the possibility of it smote him. “Kerr --”

The dark head jerked away.

Half deprecating, half husky himself, Blake said, “It’s all right. It’s all right -- it was my fault. Don’t.” And then he called, “Sweetheart.”

After saying such a giveaway thing Blake had to jump to his feet. For some shadowy reason he didn’t dare ask Avon what the matter was. Instead he went inside.

There he was nudged into a comer by Vila. “Trifle down at mouth, is he?”

“Avon’s upset.”

“I bet. Upset you might have woken up to him. He’s only afraid he’s in disgrace.”

“It’s been traumatic for him.” Once away from the technician Blake felt ambivalent again, but was determined at any rate to be fair.

“What did he do, dissolve into tears on your shoulder? I wouldn’t put it past him. Bit insulting though, to think you’d fall for a line like that.”

“Vila, do you have a grievance or are you just in shock too?”

“I was witness to what happened. He glanced at that roof immediately before Cally fell. Then he glanced away again, without firing. And she dropped.”

Blake sucked in a lungful of air. “Look, you told me at the time you saw _nothing_ , now what am I to believe? If you’re implying Avon was deliberately negligent in his duty, then -- why in space should he be?”

“You tell me.”

Under the thief’s insinuating eyes, stray phrases drifted through Blake’s mind. Himself saying, _I could never forsake the rebellion and face Cally again_. Avon saying, _I do nothing until you ask, therefore everything is your own fault_. “The suspicion’s absurd,” he snapped, and started away.

But Vila, atypically persistent, caught his arm. “Blake, you don’t know how he sabotages your place on the Liberator. He’s gone through the whole crew one by one, trying on the same line – let’s dump Blake and run off together. First it was Jenna, then Cally. When the best looking of his shipmates refused him he began to scrape the bottom of the barrel --”

Am I the last dregs in the barrel? thought Blake. “Kindly get to the point.”

“Give him an inch and he’ll take two light years before pausing for breath. Take that Freedom City prank. He bullies or tempts you into doing a thing then slaps you in the face with it afterward. That’s his favourite strategy.”

“The point.”

“Mostly he keeps it no secret that he’s taking the mickey out of you, stringing you along. But if he starts laughing slyly, behind his hand – that’s when you’ve got real problems.”

“Is there, in fact, a point?”

To Vila’s eyes, the point was that one demented and headstrong rebel, who may be impassioned but who already had one foot down the path to disenchantment, did not mix with one rampant crim with an unlikely romantic streak and an abyss of need in him, who was only the more despairing for Cally’s death. Like a cocktail of Sirian schnapps and Fornaxizn Blue Fuel, the blend was catastrophic, as Vila remembered from his stolen evening in Space City. But how to get such a point across? No one listened to his opinion anyway. So the thief said, “I could be frank, Blake, only you Alphas don’t have much of a taste for frankness.”

“I’m a fallen Alpha, you can talk plainly. If you shocked me it would be a welcome first in years.”

“Okay, then. I understand how frustrating life gets cooped up in a spaceship. And I know Alphas are so strait-laced and intellect-oriented that they warp easy. Fine, and I mightn’t mind lending Avon a helping hand, you know, if he asked the way any lonely Delta might ask a mate. Friendly, like. Nothing wrong with that.”

Blake said, looking out a handy window, “I don’t want to hear about his arrangements.”

“But Avon is one for grabbing, not for asking if you mind. And when I’m plied with drink my temper mellows too far, and I lose track of what’s going on. Until it’s too late. If I complain then he gets all intense and rough, calls me a tease, so I’m scared of aggravating him --”

“I get the picture, thank you, Vila.” Blake was stung to the quick, his quixotic portrait of Avon scrawled with vulgar graffiti.

The thief sniffed. “He tramps all over me but at least he doesn’t fool me – I’m wide awake while he’s doing it. You never can resist a downtrodden minority, Blake, but there are some downtrodden minorities you can’t champion -- like the criminally insane.”

“Why didn’t you come to me, I’d never tolerate -- abuse on my ship.” Striking his palm for emphasis Blake said, “All I ask is that we put up with each other as workmates, no less and no blessed more. I never expected you to drift around waving olive branches and exchanging beatific smiles; a pack of lone wolves is fine, leave each other in peace off the flight deck --”

“The one impossible thing is to let each other alone, Blake. There’s no-one else to take out all our emotions on. So we improvise with the poor material we’ve got. Any kind of interplay, with anyone, is better than four white walls and, beyond that, the void.” Then Vila muttered, “Speak of the devil.”

Glancing up, Blake saws Avon approaching and hastily glued his eyes to the windowpane again. The thief hailed Avon, clapping him on the shoulder. Wary but pliant under this convivial treatment, Avon said, “Roj, I thought I might scout for trooper activity in the nearby streets. Perhaps you want to help me.”

Blake found he didn’t have the discipline to give a normal answer, nor even to look Avon in the eye. No choice for it but to take his pack and walk off. The technician watched him go from deep under his brows. With an impish harmless smile Vila launched into trivial chatter. He kept it up for quarter of an hour. Now and then Avon helped with a monosyllable, attention rarely wavering from Vila’s face to his talk. The once Vila met his eyes it was with an expression more mournful than anything else.

#

Later in the evening, Avon tracked Blake down in a third storey room. He was propped in a window frame, boots up, hands between his knees. It was a moment before he noticed he had company. “What do you want?”

“A place to sleep.”

“What’s wrong with downstairs?”

After a pause Avon ventured in. His gait was listless, eyes lacklustre. “Do you mind?”

“Matter of fact I do mind. I’d prefer to be alone.”

“I wouldn’t.”

Blake studied the street below, balanced by his heels on either side of the old wood ledge. “Disappear, Kerr. That’s an order.”

“Very well.” He continued forward. “But only if it”s what you truly want. If you’re rejecting my proposal, Roj, you’ll have to reject it with conviction. Convince me – let’s have no half-heartedness, and no equivocation. I don’t intend to leave by the door. I’d be at too much of a loss. But if my company is that irksome to you, don’t hesitate to ask me to leave by the window. Depending upon your vehemence, I might oblige you.”

“You build jokes as elaborate as others build ideologies. I never know any more where they stop.”

Avon paused a few paces away. “I hazard a guess that Vila’s been telling tales about me.”

“He did warn me you’re quite a ghoul.”

“The truth has colour aplenty, but I dare say Vila wasn’t content to stick to it. He tends to get carried away by his own fabrications.”

The sky was lilac and cold, with rings of silver looping the twin moons. Blake mused, “Even this world’s sky sometimes goes blue for a while on clear nights, have you noticed? Near the moons, there.”

“Tell me one thing.” Avon strayed up to the window. “In his spiteful meddling, did he lie?”

“I’ve not the least idea, Kerr. How am I to judge whether you’re a ghoul or not?”

“Do you still wish me away?”

Kicking loose a shard of rotten wood, Blake watched it fall. “Down there?”

“I told you. It’s the only way you’re getting rid of me tonight.”

“Three storeys, and merely at my say so?” Blake mulled the idea over. “I can’t think of many reasons why not.” As a dare, he swung his legs inside to make room.

“If you can’t, Roj, then I can’t either.” Easing himself onto the ledge, Avon looked down, weight on his hands. He glanced at Blake, a confusion of smile and frown on his face. “I’m afraid it will be necessary for you to state clearly that you want me a puddle on the pavement. Say -- messier than Cally.”

The rebel, beside him facing in, was drumming his fingers. “I’m eagerly waiting to learn whether or not you’re all talk.”

“I see. That might suffice.” He pondered the space between his feet. “Do I get a last request? You might enjoy what I pick, too.”

“No. But take your time, we have all night. Are you mustering self-pity?”

“I’m mustering self-contempt. You don’t kill people from pity.”

Blake hesitated, then planted his fist against the far window frame, his arm a bar before Avon’s torso. “I dislike theatre.”

“Do you? I must confess to a partiality for it.” He dampened his lips. “This, I take it, means I can sleep here?”

“Try the far end of the room.”

With the window to himself again, Blake looked out over decadent Chingis, rich and tangible after the desert, anarchic in this slum quarter. Listening to Avon test the floorboards for somewhere safe to sleep, he hated absurdly every footfall. Unable to skirt the topic he said, “It’s still inconceivable to me that Cally’s gone. Are you having trouble assimilating it too?”

“It’s been eight hours. It took me one minute to conclude she was dead, if that answers your question. Next you’ll be kidding me you loved her.”

“We’d better not talk, we nauseate each other.” Three minutes later Blake said, “If I didn’t, it’s my inhumanity. I dare say they lobotomised the brain cells that take care of emotional involvement.”

“What gets me about you is not the hypocrisy you recognise, but that which you don’t.”

This ruffled Blake’s feathers. “Is that so? Tell me about it, I can see you’re dying to.”

“You’re in no temper for philosophy.”

“If you’re going to fling names at me you can have the courtesy to provide an explanation.”

Avon shrugged off the heavy jacket, undid his shirt cuffs. “You never follow things through to their logical conclusion. Kuvvetli’s superstition or your ethics, they’re both straitjackets to prevent free and natural thought. I wonder if you’re scared to explore your own mind, free of belief systems. The universe is chaotic. So behaviour can’t be consistent, can’t go by established rules. A thinking human reacts to mutable circumstances —”

“With mutable morality.”

“With no morality: with mutable judgement. If you were a true humanist you’d invest your faith in your own human mind and its urges. Not in simplistic codes of conduct.”

“Resulting in pure ambiguity. How does this relate to Cally?”

“Who said it does?” Next he unbuttoned his shirt. The gravitational pull Blake was conscious of between their bodies tugged at him. “Except that, along with your studious anti-thinking, you like emotional euphemisms -- lies. You and your civilised, mild-mannered, morally sound friendships -- you wouldn’t know love if you fell over it flat on your back, which incidentally you have done.” As Blake swallowed his amazement — yet again -- Avon came to lean against the wall by the window, shirt in his hands now. The rebel glanced once at his bare chest, then away because it appeared bright. He memorised it to think of while gazing at the darkened city. “I suppose,” Avon said, “you have the idea it wouldn’t have happened had you been with her and not me.”

“Vila has. I think he’s judged he can’t like you anymore.” But his mind was on raven hair between pink nipples.

“Or even if it were both of us.”

Hazily wistful, Blake said, “It’s spoiled now, Kerr.”

“No, you’re just getting cold feet. Forget Cally and Vila’s tales, why don’t you believe in what’s most real for you? And don’t tell me your rebel principles are more tangible than I am.”

“Aren’t you even guilty about Cally?”

“If you need me to be. I dare say you do -- we both have plenty of ancient guilt, but I cope with mine a good sight better. So if you wish, you can unload yours onto me from now on. Begin with blaming me for Cally.”

“But if I blamed you for Cally, I’d hate you, wouldn’t I?”

“There’s your mistake. You can’t possibly hate me, we’ve come too far. No matter how it offends your sensibilities, you can’t help but tolerate me. It’s about time you learnt tolerance, anyway, and I’m more real than your sensibilities, too.”

“You want me to undertake,” said Blake, “not to object to anything in you anymore. And let’s face it, you do get fairly objectionable.”

“As do you. But I’m prepared to indulge your faults. More than that, I like them. You believing in fairness, that ought to be mutual.”

Blake remembered Avon saying there was a feral romanticism in him that often led his morality up the creek. That he wanted beauty to be worthwhile for its own sake. Avon was beautiful. But that didn’t mean Blake should forgive him anything, or give up everything for him. “I dislike asking indulgence and I dislike giving it.”

“Why don’t you stop arguing, Roj? You can’t submit to your enemies for fear of shame, not ever, but you can to me and it won’t be defeat. You don’t want to have to win all the time. Don’t be afraid, I won’t weaken you. Quite the opposite.” Avon nodded at Blake’s shirt. “You never take that off before people, you think the scars are ugly and the tattoo questionable. With me you can be ugly or questionable — I’m much lighter on you than you yourself are, I don’t ask for pretty pictures. I don’t ask for anything but sense.” Drifting yet nearer, Avon unbuckled his belt.

Waspish and unwise Blake snapped, “That will do with the strip tease.”

Avon smiled. “Honesty at last. I thought you’d never mention that you find me ruinously handsome.”

“You’re not queer, you’re just generally perverse. You only relish the bizarreness of it, don’t you?”

“I can’t resist you undignified, Roj. When you bleed and lie and lose your temper. I like your pitfalls and your inconsistencies and your injuries.” Asking, “May I?” he stroked Blake’s ribs with the backs of his fingers, oddly deferential. “I like your secret, ignoble places. I want to be let into them.”

I can’t take this, I’ll be a whimpering idiot if he keeps this up, thought Blake. His skin tightened wherever a part of Avon came near it. “Look,” he said into his lap, “am I supposed to bravely withstand this, or what?”

“Paranoid as well as an ingrate.”

“Well, if this is your third proposition, Kerr, you can’t imagine how I appreciate it. But it isn’t necessary. Whatever it is you’re after — my support, my attention, I don’t know -- you may have it. For free.”

“I never comprehended half measures. Don’t say no.”

“Tell me why I mustn’t say no.”

“Don’t reject me.” Still stroking Blake lightly, he struck the rebel as pathetically asking to be liked. And he looked as though everything hung on his persuasiveness this evening.

“Not a chance.” Finally Blake could touch the pale sleek flank, hands reverential. “Do you want to know the trouble with you?” he asked. “Your beauty is most intense when you’re at your worst.” The lips twitched, and Blake knew he was making a fool of himself. “You wouldn’t understand how you look to me. Riot, but as though it were grace. Are you as velvety all over?”

“No, but you may think I am. You realise this is psychosomatic?

“It’s only sexual passion, I know.”

Avon laughed. “Ah, no, Roj. That’s a symptom of what’s between us. But you’re in deeper than that.”

The rebel, thumbs gentle on Avon’s nipples, wasn’t listening. “I suppose it can’t hurt after all, can it -- you and me?”

“Only if you want it to.”

Blake glanced up with his ungainly appealing grin. Which drained along with his colour when Avon bent, cavalierly, to kiss him. Trapping the elusive tongue, he wondered if he were falling down the three storeys but, no, Avon had wisely pulled him off the ledge. When greed for Avon’s nether half swamped him he sank to his knees, wanting to worship him in deed if he mustn’t in word. Under worn cloth Kerr was tender and yielding, and Blake kissed the fingers for permitting him in. Genitals unfurled like some plump narcotic flower, a dark orchid going to his head. He cared for nothing but to taste Kerr everywhere, Kerr’s crisp silk hair, Kerr’s ripe juicy mouth, Kerr puckered and soft and buried.

“Roj, look at me.” Kerr’s eyes were before him, just as he’d imagined them, luxuriant as black soil, uncultivated weeds. Kerr nipped him just to verify his pliancy, his tranquil lassitude. “No fight left in you?”

“Sweetheart, please.”

“You needn’t ask for anything, it’s yours -- only you do know I’m declaring a truce now, and it’s forever?” Kerr jostled him, gently, as though shoving understanding into him. “Come and let me convince you not to die.”

#

If he craned his neck he caught a glimpse of sky through the window. It was murky ochre, with a leaden sun. He looked back at the ceiling, and the paint peeling off.

When Avon slept he did it too deeply. For the past hour he had been oblivious to Blake’s hand playing listlessly through his hair, leaving it in knots. The light made his skin yellow, too; it made everything yellow and ambiguous. Blake himself felt lain waste, emotionally. With his companion dead to the world, his thoughts had free rein. But his thoughts made the tense troubled face heavy there on his breast look sinister. Kerr, his incubus of the witching touch and desperation to please, was again, now it was morning, Avon of the disquieting speeches and tyrannical stare, and the rumours... For a while Blake committed to memory inconsequential details of how they were twined stiflingly together on the moth-eaten blanket in the run-down house. Then he untwined himself. Picking up his clothes he felt seedy and wanted a thorough wash, but his mood was too dispirited to go to the trouble.

In the clammy dawn out on the street he sheltered in an old shopfront and called the Liberator. Hearing Jenna once again was like being pulled into harbour, out of the swells. Although there was no face it was steadying to hear her familiar nuances and mannerisms of speech. She was cool, practical -- and as demanding in her equal and opposite way as Avon.

He signed off without telling her about Cally. She would have delved too deep, as he had, and he’d have had to mention Avon. Jenna, never patient of the technician, would chew him up and spit him out. At the moment Blake couldn’t bear to listen to her abuse the infuriating amoral scamp he’d just made love with. Besides, Jenna had a mind more suspicious than Vila’s.

Back in the house, Mustakim was frying vegetables for breakfast. Avon was downstairs, looking as spruce as ever. He and Vila were eyeing each other sourly. In the dirty morning light both looked implacable. Having forsaken Kuvvetli altogether, Hediye sat with the thief and copied his bitter stare, though not understanding it.

There was an hour to get through before Blake could leave with Kuvvetli and his brother for the double assassination. Trying to regain his one track mind, which had been diverted somewhere along the way, Blake fussed over weapons and plans with Mustakim. Anticipation was cold in his belly. He’d forgotten Nav Rul’s face for Avon’s.

With half an hour to go, Blake took a gun and collected Avon with a nod. Time to brave a talk with him. “Before I go, let’s check we’re still alone here.”

Walking down the street, Avon said, “Where did you disappear to?”

“I had a conference with Jenna.”

“Ah. It was a touching farewell, I hope? We won’t need to go back to the ship, Roj, other than to pick up Orac. Then tonight we launch our coup for control of the Terra Nostra computer network. We can begin looking for that idyllic planet at once.”

“This mania you’ve suddenly developed for going it alone. Why are you scared of the crew? Are you too far gone to be tolerable to anyone but me?”

Blake seemed jumpy, peevish, almost sarcastic. Avon elected for patience. “I told you. They’re a bad influence on you and you don’t need them anymore.”

“Meaning you have nothing to lose by deserting the Liberator and the rebellion.”

“If I have nothing to lose, it’s because I’ve given up too much for you.” Avon slowed the striding rebel with a hand. But the shoulder flinched away from his touch. Stopping dead, Avon studied his hand as though for traces of communicable disease. Blake, continuing on for a pace or two, missed the mocking pantomime. “Things have changed, I see,” the technician remarked. “You got what you were after, and are consequently quite your cool-headed self again, thank you. Or is it that you were disappointed?” His glare was insecure.

“I was disappointed.”

That came as a jolt. Brown velvet eyes screwed up, but he didn’t stand on his vanity. “You judge hastily. I’m not accustomed -- I thought it eccentric but workable.” Trespassing so deeply, he had been careful not to be clumsy and alienate Blake. The rebel had been damn grateful enough at the time.

Settling his hands on his hips, Blake continued squinting away up the street. “There’s something more you can do for me, Avon. To con you into this I’ll even say please again, flatter your ego, crawl on my belly. Anything your macabre imagination can come up with that hasn’t been done around here yet. Nothing in the galaxy is beneath your undertaking, is it? Not joining the drug tsars, not prostitution. And you sensed in me a kindred spirit. Because if it’s for the revolution, I’ll sink as low as you”

“Nothing is beneath me if it’s for you,” Avon interrupted.

Blake continued with a savage edge, in his stubble and tacky shirt. “I won’t accept your tainted gifts of riches and crime syndicates. No, I’ll do worse than that. Why not? -- since our truce, as you define it, means throwing our finer qualities to the winds. And since I’ve such scant respect left for you I’m not even ashamed. I don’t care what you think of me so long as you do what I want. Because I need you, that is I need to exploit you, and by the way I don’t plan on offering a damn thing in return.”

He has a weird way of apologising in advance, thought Avon. “This is about the Terra Nostra, isn’t it? You’re getting shrewd, you knew I’d appreciate that speech.”

“Computer crime. The richest enterprise in human space. Worth trillions, and yours, so you believe, for the taking. Guess what I want you to do with it.”

“I don’t know, Roj.”

“Oh, come on, I’m sure you can guess.” Blake was animated, impatient.

“Considering your mentality,” he grimaced, “I expect you want me to destroy it.”

“Know me smugly inside out, don’t you? I’m too much the puritan – aren’t I? -- to be a crime tsar, but nothing of the kind is stopping you. Forget me, I’m a sinking ship. You storm the Terra Nostra alone, buy your patch of green grass and blue sky, buy some company. Somebody should survive this quagmire we’re in, and why not you, Kerr? For all your ugly points, who maintains that it shouldn’t be you?”

“You’re urging me to do it alone. But how about telling me the catch?”

“The catch? A trifling matter.”

“Nevertheless, I’m curious.”

Blake looked at him with dogged humour. Drawing a finger across his throat he made appropriate and graphic sound effects.

The technician cocked his head. “Do elaborate.”

“You know I’d martyr myself in a vain effort to get my own way. I trust you not nearly as far as I can throw you, so I’m manipulating you with the only means at my command. It’s foolishly vain of me, but I kid myself that this will bribe you to forgo your crime syndicate. Rigging these stratagems is your forte but I’ve done my pitiable best.”

“Tell me.”

“Jenna contacted the Terra Nostra for me. We meet this evening while the Ulus people return to the desert. The ship will be here with Orac. Thing is, the Terra Nostra asked for a hostage. A throat to cut for consolation in the event you get it wrong. And I figure they’ll interpret you swiping control from under their noses as getting it wrong.”

“You maniac.”

“This posed a problem. Who in space would hold any weight as a hostage for Kerr Avon? You and I and probably the Terra Nostra know that no-one alive could swerve you from your purpose. But procedures must be adhered to. Vila’s funner company, I thought, and Jenna’s a damn sight prettier. But I said me.”

“You take me for some kind of sadist, don’t you?”

“You’ll enjoy it, Kerr. My fate depends on you, I’m in your power. You can have whatever wicked way you please with me. I surrender, I submit.”

“You’re sick.” Avon wished he would drop that crooked smile. “There’s time to change the hostage.”

“Whom did you have in mind?”

That idea was a dead end. “You wouldn’t agree to Jenna, I suppose?”

”Don”t be funny. I’ve put my foot in it and it’s staying there.”

“Roj, don’t I have a say in this? You might consult me before you put your head on chopping blocks and the like. Considering that I --”

“Considering you got your cheap thrills in me last night?”

“That, yes, only I rather thought of it as a meaningful union. And considering, too, that I had our future all mapped out. This is your concept of a future for us, is it? I wreck the twin computer networks and the Terra Nostra slits both our throats. I suppose clasping hands and jumping off a cliff together is romantic in its peculiar way, however I still prefer the idyllic planet scenario.”

“No throats will be cut if you do it my way. You rig a delayed hidden destruct. Possible?”

“Possibly.”

“That will give us escape time. Think, Kerr, what the Terra Nostra’s downfall would mean to the revolution. Half the Federation’s stranglehold is controlling organised crime. You usurp that control and how long before the Federation usurps you? Your crazy idyll might last a year, sweetheart, if fate is kind to you. But if we simply crash the computer foundation of the Terra Nostra, it will be twenty years before the Federation can rebuild it. The choice is yours. Either you can snatch your power and riches, abandoning me to the clutches of the highly irate underworld. Or, if your masochism runs anywhere near as deep as mine, you can smash the power and riches. Thus sacrificing your only chance to make your old fantasy of wealth a reality.”

Avon tried to face Blake but the rebel kept swivelling away, to look at the harbour or a lamp post, anywhere but at the eyes which chased him. “And if,” the technician asked, “I choose the sacrifice? In place of the power and wealth, do I get you in this querulous mood?”

“I’ll let you know what you get,” growled Blake.

If only Blake would let him near -- a touch would surely bring him to his senses. “Roj, your mental meanderings have lost me, what in space is wrong? If you were going to resent me afterwards you might have had the forethought to warn, me. Perhaps you’d prefer it, after all, if I was platonic? If you can’t handle the human warmth I can easily be platonic. Nothing need be given up.”

The eyes snapped round, smiling maliciously. “Easily, eh? Lucky you. You did everything purely for my sake, isn’t that so?”

“Who else?”

Though keeping a distance from the rest of him, Blake snatched an acquiescent hand, rubbed it with tender roughness. “Now it’s all in these sweet soiled hands of yours, and you people have me so muddled up I hardly know whether to kiss them or spit on them -- perhaps that’s why. Perhaps I need this as a touchstone, because I don’t know which of your faces to believe in.”

“I don’t know what you’re condemning me for. But it’s unfair to leave the damning decisions to me.”

“In a dilemma, sweetheart?”

“Maybe if you let me know how you feel about me, it would guide me in which way to go.”

“Feel?” echoed Blake, satirical.

“Assuming that you do.”

“And if I answered that I loathe you, you’d see me dead?”

He shrugged uncomfortably. “You think so, anyway.”

“I do. So supposing it was you in my precarious position, Avon – wouldn’t you keep your trap shut?”

Mulling over the implications of this question, Avon averted his eyes.

Blake laughed, finding it all unnaturally funny. “No answer for me? Then I’ll have to guess about you, too.” He hooked his thumbs in his trouser pockets. “It was foolish of you to push things over the edge.”

The words came thick from his throat. “What have I pushed? You, the way you’re behaving.”

“We’re hooked on enmity, aren’t we -- in love and in war, too accustomed to the trappings at least of fighting. Don’t think I blame you for anything. You want to get away with doing just what you choose. That pits you against the world, too, and anything which is doomed is pathetic. Noble, even, if you see it that way. You’re a trusting optimistic generous fool, and I’m not the least help to you in the world. You can’t win, your hedonism is too frantic and high-flown, a lost cause. I can’t join your wild dreams, but the fact that they’re moribund is such an appalling pity the least I can do is go down too, apart as it must be, but with you in spirit —”

“Roj, you can’t fashion _me_ into the instrument of your death.”

“No, sweetheart? You told me you wish you’d shared Anna’s death, even if as the murderer. You would have been such a gentle one.”

“But why can’t you simply stay with me?”

“A murder intervenes.” Blake glanced at his watch. “Nav Rul’s, that is. I must go.”

“If I did it your way...” Avon crowded the familiar body, still wondering whether it might be gentle if he found the right thing to please Blake. “Would things be all right again between us, Roj?”

The rebel smiled, kind crinkles appearing round his eyes. He patted Avon’s ribs lightly as he passed by, walking with his easy gait back to the house.

#

There was a picture of Stev he remembered vividly. In the midst of action, a few moments before he caught his bullet in the spine. Stev was firing crazily but in vain, picking off guards. Face dyed sepia with violence, maddened and helpless. A shaft of sympathy had gone through the more detached Blake.

The next time he looked, Stev had been given what he was handing out. With the face scared and childish, hugged on his own lap, Blake hadn’t found it so surprisingly unjust that he was unable, through the wetness of his face, to pull the trigger. After that, Blake figured he was capable of killing anybody at need.

Lying on his stomach at the grate Blake whiled away the time with thinking.

Nav Rul sauntered up the corridor towards him, listening politely to an aide, stroking his moustache. The air was rancid. Blake tried panting shallowly but grew light-headed and had to take gulps.

Stev firing brought to mind the homicidal lunatic he and Avon had faced, sprawled in the mud. Or Avon let loose among troopers. Tracking the scope up and down he settled it to his contentment and waited for Rul’s head to appear in the target.

Through tangled thoughts of killing and retribution he focused on the necessity of Nav Rul’s death. But what the fellow was guilty of was ambiguous. It fascinated Blake how he couldn’t leave his left earlobe alone. Rul paused in his progress to reply to the aide and Blake wiped his mouth with a palm that was becoming too sweaty.

His shirt, if he ducked his head to his arm, was saturated with the smell of Avon. Apart from the scent he was alone in the cramped and freezing cavity. Blake pictured Avon with his eyes at their cruellest, but the picture failed to repel him. Understanding where the cruelty came from, he had no heart to condemn or punish it. He thought Avon the saddest thing he knew, riddled with fears and frustrations; if a crime kingdom was what it took to bring a serene smile to that face, didn”t he deserve it?

Presently the aide turned back, leaving Rul alone too. His expression became graver that way, and he walked as though he would be as happy not to get where he was going. A workaholic with no family, the newspapers had said. Everyone seemed to lose their family and never quite found another. Blake arranged his hands on the Kisiri weapon. Slowing yet again Nav Rul scratched under his belt with a twisted face, readjusted his uniform, which was low key and flattered him, then strolled on.

When the officer was a few paces past the targeted point Blake rolled onto his back and carefully set down the gun. One arm lying along the gun barrel he opened his mouth to the bad air. It wasn’t so much the homicide that troubled him. But if his clothes didn’t smell of Avon he would have more of a stomach for judging people, for retribution.

Eventually he weaved his way through the tunnels to Kuvvetli, who waited in a back lane as arranged. “I failed to fire.”

The Kisiri continued cleaning out the cracked bowl of his pipe, fastidiously. The lank black braids fell to the soles of his feet which were upturned lotus-style on his thighs.

“That was unpardonable. I don’t understand what happened.” Blake half laughed, “I’m going soft”

“Never mind it. You made the effort to act, which is more than I do. Even your nature becomes too unwieldy sometimes.” The strange plum eyes looked understanding in the dark face.

“Mustakim?”

“The Shah has two chest wounds; fatal, we believe. It’s enough. My brother went for Hediye and will be waiting at the city gate.”

“What a sop for my conscience. I’ve let you down.”

Pipe balanced between his feet, Kuvvetli asked, “How are you, Roj?”

“A mess. Things are falling down around my ears.”

“You were more stable when you came here.”

“Functional, at least.”

“He’s lost your clarity for you.”

Blake ran his fingers down the unused gun, face quieting. “Kerr?” As the Kisiri began to smoke he thought, he’ll rot his lungs out before he’s my age, the way he’s addicted to that thing. Like my kynalin. He should find himself a handsome goatherd instead. “I dare say.”

“Would you like it back?” was the inevitable question.

Kuvvetli guessed everything he was thinking and none of it appeared odd to him, even if indefensible. Blake talked. “I can’t cope with Kerr. His logic is too different to mine, listening to his leaves me in a limbo. I can’t pledge myself to contradictions, I’ll split apart. Kerr doesn’t adhere to ideas, only people, and that vanishingly rarely. But when he does dedicate himself he can be as vulnerable and naive as the next human. I rather believe he needs defending. But I’m hard pressed keeping myself together, without taking on responsibility for him.” Glancing again at the eyes he checked they were keeping abreast of him. “The Federation began blotting out sections of my mind. The only answer I can come up with is to continue with the process, for my own ends. You have the power to do that for me.”

“You mean the amnesia I can induce?”

“Yes, what you did with Cally is just like the Federation’s memory suppression treatment. If I’m to be alive tomorrow, it must be as the convinced and monomaniac mutoid I was before this proximity to Kerr made me a complex and ineffectual human, not quite convinced of anything. He brings such wishes and regrets out in me, but it’s too late for me to change.” Blake added to himself, and there’s the other possibility -- if I’m to be dead tomorrow, I wouldn’t mind going with a blindfold. I might die tonight in the Terra Nostra’s den underneath the streets of Chingis. If Kuvvetli helps me forget the conversation I just had with Avon, I’ll walk in this evening believing it’s a straightforward job, an hour or two of computer expertise in return for a handful of death contracts. I won’t know Avon might be killing me. A blindfold of ignorance will at least save me the suspense, and the doubt of him. I don’t want to suspect he might let them cut my throat.

“Roj, it’s a traumatic thing to undergo. Are you sure it’s necessary?”

“Don’t worry, I’m experienced at dealing with the trauma of mind surgery. That’s one thing I know to the hilt. I need to regain normality, Kuvvetli, or the perversion of it which is normal to me. To continue the way I was. With my purpose intact because I don’t comprehend any other purpose. Not even that of blue sky and Kerr in my arms at night. I may be fighting for utopia, but I’m too war-torn to believe in personal idylls. Kerr’s gifts are too much more than I know how to cope with. The happiness of being allowed to love him at last just bewildered me. If it’s repeated I’ll become over-grateful and willing to pay any price.”

“How much do you need to forget?”

“Wipe the whole evil-starred trip for me. When you’re finished just have me call Jenna; Jenna knows all I wish to know.” Which was only the mundane facts of their stay on Kisir Kadin, and the arrangements with Terra Nostra for that night. Nothing of the happenings between Avon and him, nothing of Avon’s ambitions with the Terra Nostra or his own counter-proposal of throwing a spanner into the computers instead. Nothing of the loss of Cally... That might be awkward. Nothing of Vila’s insinuation that Avon had refrained from preventing her loss. That was something else he was unfit to deal with, smitten with Avon as he was. “I know it’s underhand, conspiring against him this way. But he hasn’t the discipline to end this himself -- I don’t know what happened to his discipline. I wonder if he deliberately spoilt it for us before it began.”

“When you wake up,” said Kuvvetli, “you won’t know me.”

Blake touched his lean dry fingers. “I think I’ll sense you’re a friend. Will you -- give this your blessing?”

“If it’s your choice, Roj. You know I think he’s a bad influence for you. And if I’m losing you, so is he.”

“You’re the only person I know who can turn the clock back. It’s too late and I care for him too uniquely to withdraw from our misalliance of my free will. But with your drastic cures, I only need a split second’s determination to end it. And that while he and his brown eyes aren’t here.” Blake smiled, mild and good-humoured, stroking his roughened chin. “I’d rather like to tell someone before I cease to know. I stare at him when he isn’t looking back and in private say all manner of absurdities. Call him my one grand passion -- considering my history, he’s the nearest I’m likely to be given. Ah well, if you take these two weeks away I’ll forget he pointed out that I’ve no proof Stev and I were lovers. Stev always did me before.”

Kuvvetli tapped out the half-smoked tobacco from his pipe. Only stubbornness saw Blake through, and he was dragged after, unwilling, with rebellious instincts. He kept his eyes down, on the burnt weed. Kerr will hate me for this, he thought. It will hardly put him in a considerate frame of mind in which to make his choice tonight. Roj, you’re courting death again, you fruitcake.

“Pardon me if I don’t thank you for doing this,” he said. “After all, I could have chosen not to turn to you, despite there being nothing else for it. Couldn’t I?”

But the healing hand smothered his face.

#

A long while passed before Avon returned to the house. Vila sprawled on the porch. “I was hoping you’d wandered into the sea.” The thief was halfway through a bottle of native wine. Peering near-sightedly into Avon’s face he added, “Here,” and passed him the bottle.

The wine was heavily spiced, rich on Avon’s tongue. He took a few swallows, and looked at Vila’s soft nut-brown eyes. “Your trouble, Vila, is that you’re too easy-natured for sustained contempt. Aren’t you?”

The thief sniffed. “Potent, that. Mind how you drink it.”

“You don’t believe I noticed that trooper on the roof, when I looked.”

“Blake does. And how long afterwards was it you lured him to the floor? Eight or nine hours?”

The technician narrowed his eyes, and gave back the wine. “He was in need of distraction.”

“Mistake, you know.” Vila waggled his head. “I mean, that’s going to gruesomely discredit him in his own eyes, isn’t it? If he suspects you helped as much as the trooper.”

“Then why in space did you go rumour-mongering?”

“Keep him away from you. He uses people, you know that.” Vila paused. “Or maybe I doubt you, too. You get weird, Avon, when you get obsessed.”

“You don’t need to tell me I’m slightly mad.”

“Cheer up.” Vila kept the bottle going back and forth. “How about we chat of something pleasant. We can play let’s pretend. This slum is a penthouse on Freedom City -- the name of our ship is a joke, I know where real liberty lies. And it’s peopled by svelte nymphs clad only in perfume and red tassels...”

“You forget, I’ve been converted.”

“Here comes your friend, anyway.”

Avon rose, forgetting to drop the bottle. As though none too sure of where he was or where he was going, Blake was squinting at street signs. But catching sight of the pair on the porch he came up. “Bracelets on, people, the ship’s in orbit. Time we got off-planet, I think.” His manner was quiet and understated, and he was twining and untwining his fingers at his belt.

The rebel had stopped too far away, and Avon edged near his flank, though not pushing his luck to touch it. “Did you shoot straight?”

“Eh?” Blake was frowning abstractedly at the sea.

“Is your Kommissar dead?”

“Quite dead. The Terra Nostra want us in one hour’s time. I need to change, I’m disgracefully filthy... Are you staring at me soulfully for any particular reason?”

Blake’s eyes had shied from his, oversensitive, as though there was too much engraved there to risk letting anyone see. “Must we wait on the ship?” asked Avon. “Why not here?”

“We must — get your things together – Where’s Cally?” He jammed a knuckle against his forehead. After a moment he noticed Vila was gawking at him. “Does anyone know where I left my pack?”

“Where you slept,” said Vila.

Blake shifted evasively. “Why don’t you go fetch it for me, then?”

“Roj,” lilted Avon, the way he might to a child, “is there something wrong?”

“Sorry?” Taken aback by the use of his personal name, Blake stared.

Avon stared rather comically back. “I asked if you’re feeling quite the thing this afternoon. Did he shoot back on mild stun?”

“Since when did you call me -- never mind -- My pack, Vila,” he snapped, temper as crumbly as the rest of him. But Vila was too bemused to move. “What’s become of Cally, then?”

The technician, disquietened, looked as though he were trying to follow a tortuous joke. “Blake, I don’t quite know what you’re asking me.”

“Has she teleported?”

Perhaps, Avon thought, he wants to play let’s pretend, too, and wish away the facts. “If you like to have it that way... What, then — do I take it we stay here?”

“You smell as putrid as me; the least you can do for the Terra Nostra is teleport and take a shower.”

Avon paused to do some serious calculation. “You’ve been off with Kuvvetli – haven’t you?

“I don’t --” He hit his temples, cagey. “Look, if you must know my memory conditioning is playing tricks on me at the moment. Don’t ask me questions.”

“That envious twisted runt. Or was it your solution? I asked for it, didn’t I, by teaching you selfishness.”

“Avon, don’t harass me.”

“You said it was more prudent to keep me guessing. But this leaves me in no doubt as to where I stand, doesn’t it? If you had any survival sense whatsoever you’d have strung me along until the morning.”

Blake screwed his face up as if to ward Avon away from his confused interior. “You’re spouting nonsense, would you back off? -- Why are you limping?”“

“Am I?” asked Avon. “Habit. I don’t like to concede Kuvvetli can change anything.”

“Is there something the matter with your leg?” Blake was preoccupied with it.

“It’s as cured as you are. I was nothing more than your last request, was I?”

Blake noticed the bottle dangling from his hand. “Avon, you’ve not been drinking? That isn’t like you.”

“My fault, Blake,” Vila tossed in. “I led him astray, he pleads temporary inanity. See, we got to discussing the girls of Freedom City –”

Perplexed, mild, inclined to smile, Blake stood with a hand in his curls. “The pair of you reek of wine. On my head be it if you slip up this evening, Avon. I don’t believe this – there’s a job underway, and I find you of all people discussing _girls_?”

“What did you expect me to discuss?” He arched his brows. “Boys?”

“I don’t find that very amusing.”

“Nor do I, which is why I wasn’t discussing it.”

Blake thumbed his communicator, wondering whether he ought to be indignant or if amazement would suffice. That curtailed Avon’s flippancy. He caught the rebel’s wrist. “What have you got against staying down here?”

“To do what?” asked Blake.

“Nothing, if you won’t agree to anything. I won’t so much as talk. But if there’s only an hour left you, may as well do nothing with me. I mean an hour isn’t long. What is there for you on the ship? If there’s only an hour.”

“I always suspected you’d make a gloomy drunk, Avon. But you make a peculiar one.” Blake pried the technician’s clammy fingers from his teleport bracelet. Fumbling under the magnet of Avon’s gaze. “Let me loose, Avon, and don’t you know it’s impolite to stare?”

It was Blake’s pre-Kisir Kadin eyes that Avon met. An insight struck the technician. He saw an intimacy which he realised had always been there when Blake looked at him, but which he’d never tuned into before this trip. Not a generous sharing, but a willy-nilly thing as deep and subconscious as instinct. For the past year or two the rebel, it dawned on Avon, hadn’t loved him less than he had last night. Only before it had never been a pretty emotion, and Avon named it love for want of a rawer, darker word. Two people, he supposed, couldn’t weather such naked hostility as Blake and he at times attained without becoming tangled in each other. Confidants in hatred, which was as mutable as love. It isn’t much of a consolation, Roj, he thought, to know you’re still my paradoxical soul mate.

“Jenna,” Blake was saying into his bracelet, “kindly pull me out of this.”

“She may be able to, come to that, but only if I warn her.”

During this sentence Blake, rumpled and harassed and dazed as a dreamhead, left Kisir Kadin.

“There goes your friend,” said Vila.

Avon contemplated the empty street. “I shouldn’t have told him he can trample on me as much as I trample on him. He’s beginning to make a habit of it.”

“Maybe he’s just pretending to be mind-wiped.”

“Vila, where’s your bracelet?”

“Dropped in a gutter.” The thief hoisted his pack. “I must scamper if I’m to catch Hediye. Nomadic goat-breeding never appealed to me, but I think I can beguile her into joining the urban street-people. She can’t leave her bow and arrows, behind, though, her archer’s muscles give me taken-care-of feelings. With her pluck and my wits, the city is ours. The seedier quarters of it, anyway.”

“I wish you a profitable partnership, but you’re not escaping yet. I need to you to caution Jenna for me. Tell her to conceal a bracelet on Blake before he trots off to the Terra Nostra. He’s in deeper water than he knows. If the job goes wrong Jenna might have a chance of snatching him out before the thugs vent their disappointment on him.”

“Forget it; they’ll search him, you know they will. Why might the job go wrong?”

“I can take those computers for a killing, Vila. Once they confide the data to access the Terra Nostra’s underground network, Orac can rule their medieval machines.”

“You’re potty. No one tricks the Terra Nostra.”

“So I’m original. Nothing prevents me but Blake’s rather charming eyes which they will no doubt fry with a laser probe.”

“Only after they burn his softest parts off, never underestimate the filthiness of a Terra Nostran’s mind. You can’t do that to your Blake.”

“Is it worse than the things he does to me -- or to himself?”

“It will be a heap worse.”

Avon looked away, complexion waxy. “Roj asked me to disrupt their network instead. Play havoc with it as far as possible. Orac can handle that, too. But am I to ruin my opportunity only to traipse back to Liberator and give him a goodnight sneer as he slams his cabin door, just the way we always did it? Easy for him, but I can’t forget how different things can be between us. We were going to buy a planet.”

“I figure this memory inhibition bit was a gentle hint, Avon. Once was enough for him.”

“He can’t face dying tonight so has shut his eyes tight. The lunatic’s afraid of me. Wise of him, since he’s damned me if I do and damned me if I don’t. Am I to give up everything for nothing at all?”

“You can’t seriously contemplate leaving him to the Terra Nostra’s mercy.”

“Can’t I?” Avon gave a ghastly smile. “Don’t you and he suspect me of being an intermittent psychopathic personality?”

“Not if you promise me you didn’t see that trooper.”

“Thanks to you pair,” Avon said acidly, “I myself am beginning to lose confidence in either my eyesight or my mind. It’s difficult to be cruel to Roj. I look at the state of him and my cruelty seems superfluous. But does he suppose I can forgive him this?”

Vila looked more compassionate than he had for a while. “If you forgive him, he might forgive you. For whatever there might be to forgive. Do as he asks, cripple organised crime for him. And he may just be grateful enough to compromise with anything. He may even listen to you tell him stories of what happened on Kisir Kadin. Now there’s an opportunity you can’t miss -- you can paint it any way you like.”

Avon cocked his dark head, eyes sleek and intent. “Any way I like?”

“Sure. For all I know you might be serious about Blake. So you lie your heart out. Tell him that he fell into a Huda pit and lost his memory by mistake. Tell him that in his lost time on Kisir Kadin he fell for you badly, head over heels, never to struggle to his feet again. Not only did he swear loyalty to you forever, but he had a revelation of the futility of his rebellion and the error of his ways. Tell him Cally’s last words were, _What a waste of a life, I should have stayed home with Zelda_. Blake pledged to abandon this Star One lark, indeed drop the revolting kick altogether. In short, he decided that you, always his personal egotist, hedonist and disbeliever, were much the wiser of the pair of you.”

“And he will believe this unlikely tale?”

“Isn’t he yearning to believe it? I mean, by wiping the truth, he’s all but asking you to spin him a yarn instead, don’t you think? That way he can abandon the revolution without ever actually deciding to. He’s eager for you to convince him he’s already abandoned it. Then there’s no help for it, it’s a fait accompli, Blake never reneges on his promises. He’s deserted now, too late to reconsider. He’ll just have to reconcile himself to never being a martyr after all. So there he is free, having neatly skirted the difficult part of making up his mind.”

Avon liked this interpretation. “You think that’s what he really wants, Vila? I never can be sure what it is he wants, deep down.”

“The reality of it is, you failed in the end to convert him. Sure, I think the reality disappointed him. He was counting on you to silver-tongue him out of suicide, but you weren’t quite convincing enough. Blake’s not given up, though, he’s offering you another chance. So don’t give up on him. Do this Terra Nostra job his way, to sweeten his mood. Carry him off safe and unfried. Then make-believe with him that he was converted. Only take a Delta’s advice, huh? Throw in one bit of honesty, just to give the story a ring of truth.”

“Which bit of honesty, Vila?”

“Say, I love you, Roj. Simply, so he understands it. How’s a forlorn sentimental rebel to knock that back? If you tell him he decided to leave the Liberator to Jenna, as the classiest smuggler’s vessel this side of the Huimin Nebula, there’ll be no one left to compete for possession of him. It will be just you, Blake and the wild blue yonder.”

The quirk in Avon’s lips saddened. He compressed them to keep it to himself.

“What’s wrong, then?” asked the thief. “Don’t you believe my ending?”

###

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End file.
